Category: Politics & Law
“Complete privacy does not exist in this world except in a desert, and anyone who is not a hermit must expect and endure the ordinary incidents of the community life of which he is a part. Thus he must expect more or less casual observation of his neighbors as to what he does, and that his comings and goings and his ordinary daily activities, will be described in the press as a matter of casual interest to others. The ordinary reasonable man does not take offense at a report in a newspaper that he has returned from a visit, gone camping in the woods or given a party at his house for his friends. Even minor and moderate annoyance, as for example through public disclosure of the fact that the plaintiff has clumsily fallen downstairs and broken his ankle, is not sufficient to give him cause of action under the rule stated in this Section [652D]. It is only when the publicity given to him is such that a reasonable person would feel justified in feeling seriously aggrieved by it, that the cause of action arises.” – Kenneth S. Abraham and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., compilers, A Concise Restatement of Torts
“After 9/11 in New York, a horrific but specific injury was deliberately levered into an apocalyptic panic. In the annals of courage and utter cowardice, none are more vivid than the contrasting pictures of Churchill on the rooftop of 10 Downing Street, coolly watching the Blitz, and Dick Cheney cowering in a bunker to make his fear contagious. “ – Adam Gopnik, “A Point of View: Four Types of Anxiety and How to Cure Them”
“If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic an lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigrammatically imbecile over unessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome, and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at all—or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of death — except at sea, by fire, railway accident or accidental drowning in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or—and particularly—prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantage of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914.” – Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not…
“You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society.” – Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not…
“Law is at all times an approximation of the ideals of justice then predominant. Each year has its peculiar public problems, and the current law is the solution which each year finds thereto. The next year finds new problems and new solutions of the old ones.” – John B. West, “Multiplicity of Reports”
“There are some things in life that people simply have to put up with. A glaring stranger is one of them.” – Neal R. Bevans, Tort Law for Paralegals
“The beneficial effect of doubling the home market for our industry by the simple expedient of higher wages for all employees marked the opening of new vistas of prosperity if not the birth of a vast new economic concept.” – Hugh Johnson to John J. Pershing, September 28, 1930
“Conduct calculated to intimidate and distract those who, though in an adversarial position, have independent responsibilities and important roles in the effective administration of justice cannot be countenanced. The adversary system depends on the effectiveness of adversary counsel. Our rules of procedure are designed in large measure to bring to litigation adversaries who have an equal opportunity and comparable ability in the representation of opposing parties in order to assure a just result. Thus, the undue and extraneous oppression and harassment of participants involved in litigation can impair their effectiveness, not only as advocates for their clients, but also as officers of the court. An attorney who consciously and intentionally engages in such conduct perverts advocacy. Such conduct redounds only to the detriment of the proper administration of justice, which depends vitally on the reasonable balance between adversaries and on opposing counsels’ respect, trust, and knowledge of the adversary system. There cannot be genuine respect of the adversary system without respect for the adversary, and disrespect for the adversary system bespeaks disrespect for the court and the proper administration of justice.” – The Justices of the Supreme Court of the State of New Jersey, In the Matter of Lester T. Vincenti, An Attorney at Law.
“Men talk much and importantly about principles but they agree upon them much more readily than they do upon details because, perhaps, they hold theoretical principles so much more lightly than they hold practical details.” – Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative
“Among the moral forces, exists there one superior to justice? This dominates all. Old as humanity, eternal as the need of man and of people to be and to feel themselves protected, it is at the base of all civilization. Art and Science are its tributaries. Religions live and prosper in its shadow. Is it not itself a religion?” – Leon Theodor, Bâtonnier of the Order of the Advocates (as quoted by Brand Whitlock in Belgium: A Personal Narrative)
“A lawyer is not only a professional competent to represent the interest of parties before justice and to defend in a courteous and honourable struggle the interests of the client: he is a necessary auxiliary of the judge, to whom he brings his learning, his probity, and his labour.” – Leon Theodor, Bâtonnier of the Order of the Advocates (as quoted by Brand Whitlock in Belgium: A Personal Narrative)
“The authoritative statement is the statutory text, not the legislative history or any other extrinsic material. Extrinsic materials have a role in statutory interpretation only to the extent they shed a reliable light on the enacting Legislature’s understanding of otherwise ambiguous terms. Not all extrinsic materials are reliable sources of insight into legislative understandings, however, and legislative history in particular is vulnerable to two serious criticisms. First, legislative history is itself often murky, ambiguous, and contradictory. Judicial investigation of legislative history has a tendency to become, to borrow Judge Leventhal’s memorable phrase, an exercise in ‘ “looking over a crowd and picking out your friends.” ‘ Second, judicial reliance on legislative materials like committee reports, which are not themselves subject to the requirements of Article I, may give unrepresentative committee members—or, worse yet, unelected staffers and lobbyists—both the power and the incentive to attempt strategic manipulations of legislative history to secure results they were unable to achieve through the statutory text.” – Justice Anthony Kennedy, Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. (545 U.S. 546, 568 (2005); internal citations omitted)
“The presumption of negligence is not a true presumption. It is an instructed inference of fact and is circumstantial evidence to be considered by the jury. It does not vanish when defendant introduces evidence of his due care in managing the injuring instrumentality, but remains in the case. The jury must weigh the circumstantial evidence of the plaintiff against the direct evidence of the defendant.” – Illinois Pattern Civil Jury Instructions, 22.01
“Truth is often exasperating in her deliberate movements and not to be hurried but she always arrives calm and unflushed at her destination.” – Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative
“The best committee in the world is a committee of three, two of whose members are dead.” – Tom L. Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio (as quoted by Brand Whitlock in Belgium: A Personal Narrative)
“A country is not only what it does—it is what it puts up with, what it tolerates.” – Kurt Tucholsky (trans. Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945)
“The origins of the annihilation of the German Jews were much more remote in time than the events of Krystallnacht. They are to be found in popular reactions to the dislocations that accompanied Germany’s belated but headlong rise as an industrial Power in the nineteenth century and in the growth of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the Wilhelmine period, which remained latent until military defeat and economic collapse turned it into a potent rallying-cry for the rightist fanatics and demagogues who led the attack upon the Weimar constitution. The most gifted of these, Adolf Hitler, was also the one most obsessed with hatred and fear of the Jews.” – Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945
“The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.” – Justice George Sutherland, Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78 (1935)
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. Murphy)
“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. Manheim)
“There are two extremes equally dangerous to liberty. These are tyranny and anarchy. The medium between these two is the true government to protect the people.” – James Iredell, July 30, 1788 (quoted in Debate on the Constitution, Part Two, ed. Bailyn; emphases in original)
“I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.” – Justice Robert Jackson, Massachusetts v. United States, 333 U. S. 611 (1948)
“A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being.” – Justice Samuel Alito, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. ___ (2014) (emphasis in original)
“Every person in the least conversant in the history of mankind, knows what dreadful mischiefs have been committed by religious persecutions. Under the colour of religious tests the utmost cruelties have been exercised. Those in power have generally considered all wisdom centered in themselves, that they alone had a right to dictate to the rest of mankind, and that all opposition to their tenets was profane and impious. The consequence of this intolerant spirit has been, that each church has in turn set itself up against every other, and persecutions and wars of the most implacable and bloody nature have taken place in every part of the world. America has set an example to mankind to think more modestly and reasonably; that a man may be of different religious sentiments form our own, without being a bad member of society.” – James Iredell, July 30, 1788 (quoted in Debate on the Constitution, Part Two, ed. Bailyn)
“In war all repetitions are perilous. You can do many things with impunity if you do not keep on doing them over and over again.” – Winston Churchill, The World Crisis
“Those who govern should be the last people to help decide who should govern.” – Chief Justice John Roberts, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. ___ (2014) (emphases in original)
“No instrument of writing ought to be construed absurdly, when a rational construction can be put upon it.” – James Iredell, July 25, 1788 (quoted in Debate on the Constitution, Part Two, ed. Bailyn)
“A man can still control a small part of his environment, his house; he can retreat thence from outsiders, secure in the knowledge that they cannot get at him without disobeying the Constitution. That is still a sizable hunk of liberty—worth protecting from encroachment. A sane, decent, civilized society must provide some such oasis, some shelter from public scrutiny, some insulated enclosure, some enclave, some inviolate place which is a man’s castle.” – Judge Jerome Frank, United States v. On Lee, 193 F.2d 306 (2d Cir. 1951)
“The ability to wait while conditions develop is a requisite of practical policy.” – Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke (trans. Craig)
“There are two objects in forming systems of government—Safety for the people, and energy in the administration. When these objects are united, the certain tendency of the system will be to the public welfare. If the latter object be neglected, the people’s security will be as certainly sacrificed, as by disregarding the former. Good constitutions are formed upon a comparison of the liberty of the individual with the strength of government: If the tone of either be too high, the other will be weakened too much. It is the happiest possible mode of conciliating these objects, to institute one branch peculiarly endowed with sensibility, another with knowledge and firmness. Through the opposition and mutual controul of these bodies, the government will reach, in its regular operations, the perfect balance between liberty and power.” – Alexander Hamilton, June 25, 1788 (quoted in Debate on the Constitution, Part Two, ed. Bailyn)