Legal Theory Quotes

One of the things about being a law student is that the academic discipline of law is very often removed from the practical reality of law. How to complain, who to complain to, and whether or not you even need to invoke the law is very different in the real world from how it's examined in the lecture theatre.

I was quite convinced that I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I felt that law school would be a useful way to understand public policy and to understand business in this environment.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

Law has no skin, reason has no nostrils.

Personally, when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true. I think either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all. Personally I lean towards unlimited rights, I feel for instance I have the right to do anything I please, BUT! If I do something you don't like I think you have the right to kill me.

I have three degrees in history and only one in law, but since I came back to specialize in constitutional law where history is so essentially a part and an explanation of much that exists, the two disciplines blended very well.

It is necessary to establish the proposition that the [Constitution's] framers' intentions with respect to freedoms are the sole legitimate premise from which constitutional analysis may proceed.

Right... is the child of law.

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

I went to law school.

I have this fringe theory that I've sort of stress-tested a little bit - the more polarising and popular a case is, the more likely an acquittal.

The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.

I want to study law.

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.

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

The Law ... is perfection of reason.

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

During my time as a judge, as a justice, and as attorney general, I've had one overarching goal, and that is a strict interpretation and application of the laws and the Constitution. I would be Madisonian.

it is not the deed but the intention that makes the crime.

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

When I was at Notre Dame studying under Joe Evans, Frank O'Malley, and others, there was a very lively debate about the distinction between natural law and revealed truth. Most of the philosophers of church and state expected that what was going to be advocated as the law of the land would be related to natural law. If you attempted to draw lines about certain general moral truths that were derivative of logic and reason, they would prove to be widely shared, and therefore suitable to be enacted into law on both the civic and religious sides.

The law is an opinion with a gun.

International law only exists in textbooks on international law.

Before I ever got into coaching, I got my law degree at Pepperdine.

The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.