Legal Systems Quotes

Our system, for readily apparent reasons, is far superior to those in nations, mostly totalitarian, which presume an arrested person is guilty and place the burden on the accused to prove his innocence.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Democracy is a system of laws made by men….As such Islamists all over the world are against it, as their system of laws is made by God.

Law and order are more fragile than we might think.

The failure of love, that's what all laws are really.

There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance... Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide

Different cultures have different predilections for different kinds of crime.

In the early centuries of Islam, the great schools of Islamic jurisprudence were built upon the above principles. Basic to all their legal systems they developed the doctrine that liberty is the fundamental basis of law.

It is recorded how towards the end of the eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to England was taken to see the House of Commons at work. He later wrote of his astonishment at finding the that the British Parliament actually made laws and fixed punishments for their infraction - because unlike Muslims the English had not accepted a divine law revealed from heaven and therefore had to resort to such unsatisfactory expedients. Muslims still understand the expression 'the rule of law' very differently than do most Westerners.

Look at the history of civil laws in our world and the source from which they emerged, and you will see that the vast majority of them arose directly from, or where based in principle on, Roman Canon Law, or the laws of other religious origin. Sharia is another notable example.

Ethics are more important than laws.

To Western eyes and ears, Sharia law seems devoid of respect for differences of opinion or complex moral thinking. Certainly the American idea of separation between church and state is lost in Sharia-style governance.

Connections and relationships are important everywhere, anywhere - of course in China, because the rule of law it is not as strong as in the West, so a lot would rely on personal relationships.

History is the study of the world's crime

Legal systems, at both the national and international level, are therefore required to recognize, guarantee and protect religious freedom, which is a right intrinsically inherent in human nature, in man's dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and cone of the main sources of the legitimacy of the State. Religious freedom ... favors the development of relationships of mutual respect between the different Confessions and their healthy collaboration with the State and political society, without confusion of roles and without antagonism.

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.

Nay, all laws must fall, human societies that subsist by them be dissolved, and all innocent persons be exposed to the violence of the most wicked, if men might not justly defend themselves against injustice by their own natural right, when the ways prescribed by publick authority cannot be taken.

Laws fixed, certain, and uniform, are said to be the distinguishing traits of civilized from savage communities. In these last, seldom are any laws, unless it be the arbitrary and uncertain will of the strongest.

To summarize: Americans have one of the greatest legal systems, but not a monopoly of the sense of justice, which is universal; nor have we a permanent copyright on the means of securing justice, for it is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

In Germany, under the law, everything is prohibited, except that which is permitted. In France, under the law, everything is permitted, except that which is prohibited. In the Soviet Union, under the law, everything is prohibited, including that which is permitted. And in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.

I don't know why it's so hard to believe women. You to go Saudi Arabia and you need two women to testify against a man. Here you need 25.

The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another.

I have a lot of faith in justice systems around the world even though there were cases in the past where that faith wasn't justified in some countries.