Legal Standards Quotes

As long as the law exists, there will be morality.

It’s not what I as a judge believe is right. It is what I believe the normal man of reasonable ability and integrity believes is right.

Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations.

Decisions on a matter as serious as charging an individual with a crime cannot be decided on anything less than complete examination of all available evidence. Anything less is not justice.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

In Nigeria they convict by law, not by the truth

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that individual communities should set obscenity standards. Whenever a case is tried, it will be based on a community standard for that particular place.

What I am for is protecting, with the highest standards in our courts, the religious liberty of Hoosiers.

Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy.

Our job in Congress is to follow the facts of any investigation wherever they lead.

When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can't be rented out as a dwelling.

That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.

I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

The common law of England has been laboriously built around a mythical figure—the figure of the reasonable man.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.

It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious readily provable offense.

My feeling is that the Supreme Court reached a reasonable standard of protection of speech in the 1960s, a standard higher than any other country in the world, to my knowledge. In brief, speech should be protected up to participation in imminent criminal action.

What's the Christian-bashing all about? Simple- a struggle for the soul of America is under way, a struggle to determine whose views, values, beliefs and standards will serve as the basis of law.

Written laws are formulas in which we endeavor to express as concisely as possible that which, under such or such determined circumstances, natural justice demands.

Our Constitution does not require that all crimes be solved.

I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it's our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics.