Legal tradition

“ But, while it is the duty of the courts to put a construction upon statutes which shall, so far as possible, be consonant with good morals, we know of no legal principle which would authorize us to pronounce a statute of this kind, which is plain and unambiguous upon its face, void, by reason of its failure to conform to our own standard of social and moral obligations. ”

“ But if we take the view of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of his mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.
Take again a notion which as popularly understood is the widest conception which the law contains;—the notion of legal duty, to which already I have referred. We fill the word with all the content which we draw from morals. ”

“ Rights to do certain acts, such, for instance, as the visitation and superintendence of a college and the appointment of its officers, may surely be vested rights, to all legal intents, as completely as the right to possess property. ”

“ It is a rule of law, in the construction of all statutes, contracts and legal instruments whatsoever—that is, those which courts design, not to invalidate, but to enforce—that where words are susceptible of two meanings, one consistent, and the other inconsistent, with liberty, justice and right, that sense is always to be adopted, which is consistent with right, unless there be something in other parts of the instrument sufficient to prove that the other is the true meaning. ”

“ The act itself, with all the circumstances of the inhabitants before and at the time of its passage, have formed the subject of legal judgments and professional opinions upon which mighty interests have grown up and now repose. ”

“ On Law Day, we celebrate our Constitution and all of the legal institutions that flow from it. Though often thought of as the province of lawyers, we must never forget that these laws and institutions were created not just by lawyers, but also by farmers and architects; businesspeople and laborers; doctors, ranchers, merchants, and machinists. The protection under our laws is the birthright of all Americans, the great inheritance we have received from those who have come before. ”

“ A dispute having arisen as to the legality of an unusual and occasional practice, the legislator thinks fit to declare it legal, trusting all the while, consciously or unconsciously, to habit, sentiment, or prejudice, to prevent its extending itself in a way which, to him, as doubtless to the great bulk of the community, would appear not merely mischievous, but revolting. ”

“ Conceding, or better realizing, this inherently fluctuating character or quality of public policy, we see that the enactment of statutes to declare or define it must of necessity be a dangerous business, because such statutes, however accurately they reflect the public policy of the moment of their enactment, must almost immediately begin to be wrong. The Common Law, reposing, according to the legal fiction, in the bosom of the court, is flexible, and can change or be changed, as we have seen, with the change of condition ”

“ The Constitution of the United States, in creating and defining the judicial power of the General Government, establishes this distinction between law and equity, and a party who claims a legal title must proceed at law, and may undoubtedly proceed according to the forms of practice in such cases in the State court. ”

“ As is true of many problems in the law, the answer is to be found not in legal learning but in the realities of the record. Though variously expressed in the decisions, the governing principles are clear. ”

“ So great is the superiority of legislation over all other methods of legal evolution, that the tendency of advancing civilisation is to acknowledge its exclusive claim, and to discard the other instruments as relics of the infancy of law. The expressed will of the state tends to obtain recognition not only as the sole formal source of law, but as its exclusive material source also. Statute law has already become the type or standard, from which the other forms are more or less abnormal variations. ”

“ This sketch would, of course, have to be modified in many ways if we attempted to treat the unofficial fragments of customary law in the same way as the paragraphs of royal codes, and even more so if we were able to tabulate the indirect evidence as to legal rules. ”

“ All legally recognized interests of substance in developed legal systems are normally individual interests. To the historical jurist of the nineteenth century, this fact, coupled with the development of ownership out of possession, served to show us the idea which was realizing in human experience of the administration of justice and to confirm the position reached by the metaphysical jurists. ”

“ If a country, in place of possessing laws, with magistrates to enforce and judges to expound them, possessed nothing but statutes on parchment, and a vast legal literature for their exposition, statutes and comments being alike commended to the private judgment of individuals, would it be possible that subjects could be trained up with the habit or spirit of political obedience? Every man might be educated till he resembled a village attorney ”

“ They exhibit a striking specimen of the involutions which ingenuity may cast about legal rights, and an instance of the growing pretensions of some of the State Courts over the exercise of the powers of the general government. ”

“ Personal statutes are of universal validity; real statutes have no extra-territorial authority. The determination of the class under which a particular law ought to fall is one of great difficulty, and one in which there is often a conflict of legal opinion. ”

“ As those rights which it is the duty of courts of justice to protect and enforce include equitable as well as legal rights, and as each of these classes of rights requires separate treatment, it will be convenient to begin with legal rights. ”

“ Certain phases of our oldest legal history, notably those which are called ‘constitutional,’ have been so fully treated by classical books, that at the present moment there is no good reason why we should traverse the ground that has been covered. ”

“ Legal tribunals have also powerfully assisted to shape and modify conceptions of proprietary right by means of the distinction between Law and Equity, which always makes its first appearance as a distinction between jurisdictions. ”

“ On condition that you protect my rights, I will protect your rights. How, then, does some party obtain the right to claim the protection of the other? Evidently, by actually protecting the rights of the other.
But if this is so, no party will ever obtain a strictly legal claim to the protection of the other. ”

“ In cases of prescriptive rights and customs, and other claims of a public nature, tradition and reputation have been in like manner admitted. They are all cases of a general right, affecting a number of persons, having a common interest. ”

“ The Constitution guarantees the principle of legality, the hierarchy of legal provisions, the publicity of legal statutes, the non-retroactivity of punitive provisions that are not favourable to or restrictive of individual rights, the certainty that the rule of law shall prevail, the accountability of public authorities, and the prohibition of arbitrary action of public authorities. ”

“ In this situation they are frequently to decide, and that upon their oaths, questions of nice importance, in the solution of which some legal skill is requisite; especially where the law and the fact, as it often happens, are intimately blended together. ”

“ Both factors indicate that the heroic age properly marks the origin of the legal system, even though it be true that all such changes are gradual and that occasional beginnings of the legal system, therefore, may be found at an earlier period, in connection with the very ancient institution of chieftainship. ”

“ The ever-changing, perpetually evolving forms of social, commercial, political, and religious life of a restless, marching, ambitious race, necessitate corresponding changes and evolutions in laws and constitutions. These necessary legal supplements are as varied in origin as are the nations that produce them. ”

“ Where the language of a statute is plain, unambiguous, and well understood according to its natural and ordinary sense and meaning, the statute itself furnishes a rule of construction beyond which the court cannot go. ”

“ When a statute alters the common law the meaning shall not be strained beyond the meaning of the words, except in cases of public utility, as when the end in view appears to be more comprehensive than the enacting words. ”

“ Moreover, these statutes, which at any moment may revolutionize a man's liberty or his property, are not as they were in old times—a mere codification, or attempt at the best expression of a law already existing and well "understanded of the people" ”

“ These are the general characteristics of that incomparable monument of jurisprudence whose noble conceptions of the ends of legislation are best expressed in its own concise and energetic language:
“The law is the rival of divinity, the messenger of justice, and the guide of life. It dominates all classes of the state, and all ages of humanity, male and female, the young and the old, the wise and the ignorant, the noble and the peasant. It is not designed for the promotion of private aims, but to shelter and [189] protect the general interests of all. ”

“ Among these he mentions a law which punishes a citizen for an innocent action; a law that destroys or impairs the lawful private contracts of citizens; a law that makes a man a judge in his own cause; and a law that takes the property from A. and gives it to B. 'It is against all reason and right,' says the learned justice, 'for a people to intrust a legislature with such powers ”

“ The subject of the civil law, the ego, the object of the civil law, the objective or natural world, the relation between the two, or property—such is, in a word, the method; the equality of all men before the law is its principle; the respect for property and the directness of litigation are its aims. ”

“ The possibilities of analytical and historical development of the classical materials have been substantially exhausted. While jurists have been at these tasks, a new social order has been building which makes new demands and presses upon the legal order with a multitude of unsatisfied desires. ”

“ The Common Law, an inheritance from England, enriched with authoritative decisions by our own courts, is the groundwork of the law in all the States, and its principles are binding in the absence of express statutes. ”

“ The lawyer finds in the Latin language the system of civil law most conformable with the principles of justice of any which has ever yet been established among men, and from which much has been incorporated into our own. ”

“ So jurisprudence is compelled to regard something more than law simply, if it is to comprehend law. It has for its subject-matter the study of the relation of the fact law to all of the other facts of society, and so it goes back of positive law and seeks its springs and motives in systems like the early Roman and the Hindoo, where rites, liturgies, prayers, moral ordinances, and what we know distinctively as civil laws, appear to be mingled in mere senseless confusion. ”

“ Law, ceasing to frame mischief, is restored to its own wholesome and glorious character, as the handmaid of equity—and one of the first lawyers of the age, placed at the fountain head of justice, and freed by the gathered effulgence of truth, from the sophisms of his character and his class, casts off his prejudices and restores to liberty, her resting place on earth. ”

“ But since the days of the Ten Commandments it has been recognised that statute law, carefully considered and simply expressed and written down on tables of stone or otherwise, is a better-class article for ordering the affairs of a modern community. ”

“ What the difference may be, and what the consequences of such difference, between this lucrative function, and the true duty of Civil Law,—namely, to fulfil and continue in all the world the first mission of the mightiest Lawgiver, and declare that on such and such conditions, written in eternal letters by the finger of God, every man’s house, or piece of Holy land, is his own,—there does not, it appears, exist at present wit enough under all the weight of curled and powdered horsehair in England, either to reflect, or to define. ”

“ The great principle of the common law, which is equally the teaching of Christian morality, so to use one's property as not to injure others, forbids any other application or use of the rights and powers conferred. ”

“ Such a possession is only possible in a state of civil society. In civil society, a declaration by word or act that an external thing is mine and making it an object of the exercise of my will is "a juridical act." ”

“ That court best serves the law which recognizes that the rules of law which grew up in a remote generation may, in the fullness of experience, be found to serve another generation badly, and which discards the old rule when it finds that another rule of law represents what should be according to the established and settled judgment of society, and no considerable property rights have become vested in reliance upon the old rule. ”

“ Every time they interpret contract, property, vested rights, due process of law, liberty, they necessarily enact into law parts of a system of social philosophy, and as such interpretation is fundamental, they give direction to all law-making. ”

“ The first is absolute but, in the nature of things, the second cannot be. Conduct remains subject to regulation for the protection of society.' The Court today allows belief, not conduct, to be regulated. ”