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"The common law of England conforms to the model of collective rationality that Hayek calls 'catallactic.' It is not imposed from above by some executive body, but constructed from the bottom by discovering the just solutions to real human conflicts, and then deriving from them, through the doctrine of precedent, a system of legal rules. Our law is binding on the sovereign, since it consists in the remedies that the courts have offered in the sovereign's name; and it can avoid unjust edicts through the 'doctrines of equity,' which produce those marvellous intellectual constructs such as trust, beneficial ownership and injunction, which—on some understandings—are responsible for the pre-eminence of England in the world of finance. In all kinds of ways the common law resists dictatorship, and even if it is also a rule of common law that the courts apply all statutes according to 'the will of Parliament,' it is for the courts, not Parliament, to discern what that will might be. Furthermore, the rootedness of the common law in the search for remedies has meant that it responds immediately to grievances, and has made the top-down regulation of commerce largely unnecessary. Product liability, for example, governed in continental systems by massive regulation, was, until entry into the European Union, largely governed in English law by the leading case of Donoghue v. Stevenson of 1932, in which someone made ill by a decomposed snail that had found its way into a ginger-beer bottle successfully sued the manufacturer. The case made it clear that the rule of common law is not, as in Roman law, caveat emptor, but rather caveat vendor—let the vendor take note of his duty of care towards all those who can reasonably be expected to encounter his product." Roger Scruton   "Right from the start, almost everything that mattered in Anglo-Saxon England was written in English: law, poetry, history, medical advice, especially law. Everywhere else in Europe, Latin was the language of learned men doing their business. Not in England. And nowhere else produced such an abundance of written law as England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. As Nicholas Vincent points out in his study of Magna Carta, Anglo-Saxon England, though not Norman France, was 'a society already hard-wired with law.' Written codes of Anglo-Saxon law survive in numbers, perhaps from Ethelbert's day, more reliably from Alfred's. Elton was dazzled: Naturally, the laws being written down provide splendid information on the kind of society with which we are dealing. The first remarkable thing about them is the language in which they were originally composed. The kings and their advisers used the vernacular; unlike the rest of Western Europe they escaped the bureaucratic imposition of Latin. And even though the Norman conquerors rewrote the laws in Latin and conversed in French, English reemerged as the elite language in the course of the thirteenth century, in tandem with the development of the common law." Ferdinand Mount   "The most useful and practical part of the law of nations is, no doubt, instituted or positive law, founded on usage, consent, and agreement. But it would be improper to separate this law entirely from natural jurisprudence, and not to consider it as deriving much of its force and dignity from the same principles of right reason, the same views of the nature and constitution of man, and the same sanction of Divine revelation, as those from which the science of morality is deduced. There is a natural and a positive law of nations." James Kent   "The term 'minimum wage' law defines the process by its hoped-for results. But the law itself does not guarantee that any wage will be paid, because employment remains a voluntary transaction. All that the law does is reduce the set of options available to both transactors. Once the law is defined by its characteristics as a process rather than by its hoped-for results, it is hardly surprising that there are fewer transactions (i.e., more unemployment) with reduced options. What is perhaps more surprising is the persistence and scope of the belief that people can be made better off by reducing their options." Thomas Sowell   "The Nazis' contempt for Christianity's emphasis upon human suffering was robustly rebuffed: 'By foolishly representing Christian humility as a self-degradation and an unheroic attitude, the repulsive pride of these innovators only makes itself an object of ridicule.' Pacelli also found time to condemn the Nazis' obsessions with greatness, heroism, strength and so forth, not to speak of their athletic cult of the body, often cultivated at the expense not only of the mind but of those unfortunates the Nazis were compulsorily sterilising. He found a moment for a shaft of sarcasm: 'The Church of Christ, which in all ages up to those which are nearest to us counts more heroic confessors and martyrs than any other moral society, certainly does not need to receive instruction from such quarters about heroic sentiment and action.' Pacelli used Natural Law doctrine to confound the Nazi philosophy of 'Right is what is advantageous to the people.' The encyclical stated that 'the believer has an inalienable right to profess his faith and to practise it in the manner suited to him. Laws which suppress or render difficult the profession and practice of this faith are contrary to natural law.' Nazi attempts to monopolise the education of children at the expense of their parents or the Churches were attacked too: 'Laws or other regulations concerning schools, which take no account of the rights of the parents given them by natural law, or which by threats or violence nullify them, contradict the natural law and are essentially immoral.'" Michael Burleigh   "Could they be happier without it, the law, as a useless thing, would of itself vanish; and that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices. So that however it may be mistaken, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as we are told, 'a liberty for every man to do what he lists.' For who could be free, when every other man's humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own." John Locke   "At marriage the wife is recognized as half of her husband, but in after-conduct they are treated worse than inferior animals. For the woman is employed to do the work of a slave in the house, such as, in her turn, to clean the place very early in the morning, whether cold or wet, to scour the dishes, to wash the floor, to cook night and day, to prepare and serve food for her husband, father, mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, and friends and connections! (For amongst Hindus more than in other tribes relations long reside together, and on this account quarrels are more common amongst brothers respecting their worldly affairs.) If in the preparation or serving up of the victuals they commit the smallest fault, what insult do they not receive from their husband, their mother-in-law, and the younger brothers of their husband?" Rammohun Roy   "In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved." John Marshall Harlan   "Moral and spiritual laws govern the moral life, but they do not regulate society, which is an association of free individuals, all with purposes of their own. Moral and spiritual laws must therefore be supplemented by another kind of law, one that is responsive to the changing forms of human conflict. This was made transparently clear by Jesus in the parable of the Tribute Money ('Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's'), and by the Papal doctrine of the 'Two Swords'—the two forms of law, human and divine, on which good government depends. The law enforced by our courts requires the parties to submit only to the secular jurisdiction. It treats all parties as responsible individuals, acting freely for themselves. Law exists in order to resolve conflicts among free beings, not in order to lead them to salvation." Roger Scruton   "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself." Robert Jackson   "Yes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine deserves condemnation—but are law firms the ones to be doing it? Law firms are collections of lawyers—ideally, lawyers of diverse viewpoints—who have come together to practice law. They're not think tanks, editorial boards, or Hollywood celebrities, and opining on the issues of the day is not their job." David Lat   "Liberalism's four core norms or values are personal security (the monopolization of legitimate violence by agents of the state who are themselves monitored and regulated by the law), impartiality (a single system of law applied equally to all), individual liberty (a broad sphere of freedom from collective or governmental supervision, including freedom of conscience, the right to be different, the right to pursue ideals one's neighbors think wrong, the freedom to travel and emigrate and so forth), and democracy or the right to participate in law-making by means of elections and public discussion through a free press. That public disagreement is a creative force may have been the most novel and radical principle of liberal politics." Stephen Holmes   "The principal ideas have come to us relatively unscathed, but some came in limping. The medieval period was exceptional for the clear identification and definition it gave to principles and concepts which were later to become mainstays of democratic governance, such as consent, representation, and the universal rule of law. Alcuin of York, brought to Europe by Charlemagne to found his school, had written as early as the ninth century that every government's authority 'derived solely from the common agreement of the subjects.' This idea was later given solid legal status by the canon law principle that 'whatever concerns and affects everyone must be approved by everyone.' The two semi-autonomous powers that defined medieval society, Church and Kingdom, 'could only exist peacefully,' Reilly notes, 'through shared recognition of the rule of law, its supremacy over each.'" Dennis Quentin McInerny   "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." Martin Luther King   "The German Democratic Republic paid lip service to the institutions of democracy. There were district attorneys, whose job it was to administer justice, and lawyers, whose job it was to represent clients, and judges, whose job it was to pass judgment. There were, at least on paper, political parties other than the ruling Socialist Unity Party. But really there was just the party, and its instrument, the Stasi. Judges often got their instructions from the Stasi which, in turn, passed them on from the Party—right down to the outcome of judgment and the length of the sentence. The connection of the Party, the Stasi and the law went from the ground up: the Stasi, in consultation with school principals, recruited obedient students with an appropriately loyal attitude for the study of law. I once saw a list of dissertation topics from the Stasi Law School at Potsdam, which included such memorable contributions to the sum of human knowledge as 'On the Probable Causes of the Psychological Pathology of the Desire to Commit Border Infractions.' There was no room for a person to defend themselves against the State because all the defence lawyers and all the judges were part of it." Anna Funder   "Both the Romans and the English shared the idea that the law is something to be discovered more than to be enacted and that nobody is so powerful in his society as to be in a position to identify his own will with the law of the land. The task of 'discovering' the law was entrusted in their countries to the jurisconsults and to the judges, respectively—two categories of people who are comparable, at least to a certain extent, to the scientific experts of today." Bruno Leoni   "In a republic, the sobriety of the citizens replaces the force of authority as the principal source of order. Anarchy and tyranny are the eternal antinomies of political life, and each breeds the other. Aristotle, in the second book of the Politics, says that the power of the law lies essentially in the power of habit, which is 'second nature.' That is why the formation of good habits is the primary task of the law. The moral virtues are good habits. The habit of law-abidingness is called by Aristotle legal justice, which he also describes as justice in its most comprehensive sense, since it commands us to do all the acts of all the virtues. When men have good habits they are in no need of external restraints." Harry Jaffa   "Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the laws. The job of a judge is to apply the law. And so it's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law." Elena Kagan   "Because the Equal Protection Clause renders the color of one's skin constitutionally irrelevant to the Law School's mission, I refer to the Law School's interest as an 'aesthetic.' That is, the Law School wants to have a certain appearance, from the shape of the desks and tables in its classrooms to the color of the students sitting at them. I also use the term 'aesthetic' because I believe it underlines the ineffectiveness of racially discriminatory admissions in actually helping those who are truly underprivileged." Clarence Thomas   "Large, politically complex societies emerged only after—or as a consequence of—the replacement of kinship institutions and nepotism by other institutions, by what Hobbes called the power that keeps men in awe, namely, the political state and law. That is also why almost all early anthropologists were lawyers or were interested in the development of law from vague customs. They were appropriately astonished by the obvious fact that most of the peoples in the newly discovered worlds of central Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, Australia, and the Americas lacked what we have come to know as the political state and the law." Napoleon Chagnon