Legal Privilege Quotes

The judges are a big problem. Law is equal for everyone, except for them.

Well, there is an attorney-client privilege here that needs to be respected, and it's a privilege that has been found to be worthy of protection by our courts.

It is an established principle of jurisprudence in all civilized nations that the sovereign cannot be sued in its own courts, or in any other, without its consent and permission; but it may, if it thinks proper, waive this privilege, and permit itself to be made a defendant in a suit by individuals, or by another State.

In all candor, the Court fails to perceive any reason for suspending the power of courts to get evidence and rule on questions of privilege in criminal matters simply because it is the president of the United States who holds the evidence.

Well, if I used the privilege of self-incrimination at that time, I must have felt that perhaps there might be something that might incriminate me in answering.

Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty, is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle; and while he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ of assistance, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.

We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

If when I am libelled I take no notice, the world believes the libel. If I sue, I have to pay about one hundred pounds' costs for the privilege, and gain the smallest coin the country knows for recompense.

One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the [George W.] Bush administration is the increased assertion of the "state secrets" privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU - which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention - from getting their day in court.

It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge; and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.

The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one.

Executive Privilege

The president ... cannot suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, nor authorize a military officer to do it…. a military officer has no right to arrest and detain a person not subject to the rules and articles of war ... except in aid of the judicial authority, and subject to its control

The costs of marriage breakdown are borne by the entire society, and therefore it is reasonable for the entire society to demand support for marriage - to insist that it is privileged both culturally and legally.

Hillary Clinton put her emails on a secret server nobody knew about except for the man that was given the Fifth. Whatever happened to him? Where is he? What happened to him? Where did he go? He pled the Fifth. Never... That's the end of him.

You can assert a fifth amendment privilege and not testify. But if you go in and swear to tell the truth, then you better do it. Otherwise, if a prosecutor finds that you have testified in a way that is factually incorrect and you had reason to know that it was factually incorrect, then you're guilty of perjury.

I think some orator commenting upon that fate said that though the winds of heaven might whistle around an Englishman's cottage, the King of England could not.

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

It always rankled me - in law school and the legal profession - when lawyers would speak to each other in their own exclusive language.

The values of confidentiality of matters occurring before the grand jury is very important.

Famous people are above the law.

[The legislature] has no right to give monopolies of legal privilege—to bestow unequal portions of our common inheritance on favorites.

It may be stated as a general principal, that public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law itself regards as confidential.

Public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law itself regards as confidential, and respecting which it will not allow the confidence to be violated. On this principle, suits cannot be maintained which would require a disclosure of the confidences of the confessional, or those between husband and wife, or of communications by a client to his counsel for professional advice, or of a patient to his physician for a similar purpose. Much greater reason exists for the application of the principle to cases of contract for secret services with the government.