Legal Limits Quotes

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

I deny that the power of amendment [of the Constitution] carries the power of revolution.

A Supreme Court nomination and appointment is not a roving commission to rewrite our laws.

'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish? Are those anxieties relieved?' I don't think so.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

As a lawyer and a former prosecutor, I know the limits of the power and authority of the president. I know what is legal and what is not.

What a President may do as a matter of expediency or extremity may never reach a definitive constitutional decision.

The State may, indeed, make the drinking of one drop of liquor an offense to be punished by imprisonment, but it would be an unheard-of cruelty if it should count the drops in a single glass and make thereby a thousand offenses, and thus extend the punishment for drinking the single glass of liquor to any imprisonment of almost indefinite duration.

A convict is not to be scourged until the flesh fall from his body and he die under the lash, though he may have committed a hundred offenses, for each of which, separately, a whipping of twenty stripes might be inflicted.

Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

I don't think I can change the fact that the court can cancel a law, but I think the court should only get involved in extreme issues like human rights violations.

Even when safety guidelines and regulations are in place, the rate of chemicals acceptable by law may be far higher than what is genuinely safe.

I would not allow CIA to undertake activity that is immoral, even if it is technically legal.

There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate. —MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

As a general rule, interrogations without clearly defined legal limits are brutal. Particularly when they have an imperative to get information out of a captive immediately.

Trump's attacks against the judiciary reflect his view that only he should be able to decide what he can and cannot do.

Right is not unlimited, but is limited by the laws.

We have the right to swing our arm until it hits the other fellow's nose.

[The] government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

Opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act

No matter who you are or what you intend to do, you should not exceed the boundaries of the rule of law.

It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property. The existence of persons and property preceded the existence of the legislator, and his function is only to guarantee their safety.

When you're a federal agent you don't get to arrest people for like $5.00 petty crimes or anything like that, they'll throw you right out of there.

There has to be some limit to what lawyers can take from their clients. Otherwise, cagey attorneys end up with the lion's share of the settlement and the victims end up with little more than scraps.