Top 100 Legal Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best legal quotes ever written, picked out of the full legal archive on QuoteForever. You will find Lysander Spooner, Janet Reno, John Yoo and Jon Porter among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

While there continues to be differences, the important point is that all citizens and elected officials use democratic and legal avenues for solving those differences.

2

I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

3

The only real lawyers are trial lawyers, and trial lawyers try cases to juries.

4

In terms of the legal matter of creating a contract between two people that's called marriage, and allowing them to live together with the protection of law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country.

5

In high school, I discovered myself. I was interested in race relations and the legal profession. I read about Lincoln and that he believed the law to be the most difficult of professions.

6

Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right.

7

I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.

8

Legal reform in Russia is a must. And I keep track of it daily.

9

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

10

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

11

They don't need a lawyer, they need a toastmaster.

12

IT is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall - which was, and is, before all a Law College - and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.

13

The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about these things.

14

Yusuf Qaradawi is probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.

15

If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts.

16

It is just called Continuing Legal Education. You can go to lectures, you can even listen to tapes on airplanes - they want you to stay current. So you do have to stay current to maintain your license even if you are not practicing.

17

The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.

18

After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers.

19

I dealt with legal questions in the interest of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP and its members during the difficult years of struggle for the victory of the Movement.

20

I support legal immigration.

21

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

22

Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved.

23

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

24

Therefore, if we are a Nation of laws and a Nation of immigrants, immigration should occur within a legal framework, not through the machinations of illegal schemes and scams that threaten our national security.

25

I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.

26

The more expansive government is, the more perils people face in daily lives, be it from IRS agents or from child support services, or from other agencies that often have little or no legal restraints on their power.

27

The good lawyer is the great salesman.

28

I have been surrounded by some of the smartest, brightest, most caring lawyers, by agents who are willing to risk their lives for others, by support staff that are willing to work as hard as they can.

29

I think that the proposed constitution is one of the European legal documents with the strongest social dimension I have seen since I began following European issues.

30

To play a lawyer and have one year of law school under your belt, you sort of know what you're talking about! I'm able to memorize the legal courtroom stuff a lot faster than I would have been able to otherwise.

31

The right to a trial is a core principle of the American legal system. Depriving Americans of these essential liberties undermines the Constitution while doing nothing to strengthen our national security.

32

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

33

A good lawyer is a bad Christian.

34

The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq and the war against al Qaeda.

35

Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.

36

Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.

37

The Patriot Act removed major legal barriers that prevented the law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense communities from talking and coordinating their work to protect the American people and our national security.

38

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

39

The Supreme Court ruled that disabled golfer Casey Martin has a legal right to ride in a golf cart between shots at PGA Tour events. Man, the next thing you know, they're going to have some guy carry his clubs around for him.

40

Law is born from despair of human nature.

41

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

42

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

43

We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.

44

Legal documents have mistrust written all over them. It's unfortunate, but the human DNA is so tuned to kind of taking you for granted that we tend to protect ourselves legally. That's why I don't read them as, if I read them, I will go soft. To me, the human relationship is far more important than the professional bond I share with anyone.

45

I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

46

However, we do not lack anti-terrorist laws. I do not believe that the recent London bombs were the result of any deficiencies in our legal system.

47

Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause.

48

Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.

49

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

50

I think it's very healthy to use journalistic and legal techniques to investigate the evidence for and against Christianity and other faith systems.

51

In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.

52

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.

53

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers, and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

54

If somebody invented cigarettes today, the government would not legalize them.

55

I love the new legal immigrants; they want their kids to be safe just like I do.

56

It is legal because I wish it.

57

Just as TurboTax simplified much of the tax process, so has the colossally scary legal process been reduced to a kinder, gentler series of mouse clicks and 'Continue' buttons by LegalZoom, the online leader that has become so prominent in its market that it's practically a generic.

58

The mental capacity of a person to make reasonable contracts, is the only criterion, by which to determine his legal capacity to make obligatory contracts. And his mental capacity to make reasonable contracts is certainly not to be determined by the fact that he is, or is not, twenty-one years of age.

59

Now a slave is not 'held' by any legal contract, obligation, duty, or authority, which the laws will enforce. He is 'held' only by brute force. One person beats another until the latter will obey him, work for him, if he require it, or do nothing if he require it.

60

The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a government.

61

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.

62

I hope gay marriage will be legal in every state.

63

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

64

These are people who haven't gone through the legal means to becoming citizens like our forefathers did. They want all the benefits but none of the responsibilities.

65

You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.

66

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

67

We have to get control of our borders. You can only do that if you make companies obey the law and not hire undocumented or illegals. They can only do that is if they have a Social Security Card that has biometrics so they know whether the person is legal or not.

68

Gambling is legal and betting is legal, for what I bet.

69

I've become so earthy. And I never was earthy. I'm doing all kinds of different roles which are not at all like the intellectual and the legal mind of Ben Stone.

70

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

71

I would expect illegal alien parents to take care of their children. If it means the kids go back home with them, that's what happens. If it means there are legal relatives in the United States that can take care of them, that can happen to. But I believe it's the parents responsibility to take care of the kids.

72

The Grameen Bank Ordinance with amendments up to 2008 is a beautiful legal structure for the fulfillment of the ideals and objectives of the bank. Any change in this structure will be devastating for the bank.

73

The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?

74

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

75

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

76

I've always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.

77

I showed that privacy was an implicit right in Jewish law, probably going back to the second or third century, when it was elaborated on in a legal way.

78

People do not win people fights. Lawyers do.

79

For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.

80

The kingdom of God is an order of government established by divine authority. It is the only legal government that can exist in any part of the universe.

81

All of my life I have stayed away from violence and the instruments of violence, and have seen a legal, democratic struggle as the only means to achieve change.

82

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

83

Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.

84

We got a little waylaid along the way. The whole problem started about 10 years ago with management and legal battles, then still trying to make albums while I was doing all of that.

85

I think we Americans, of all people, understand the importance of a good, legal, constitutional framework as the basis of political life.

86

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

87

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

88

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

89

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

90

Fairness is what justice really is.

91

Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.

92

Each day, each one of us chooses not to do many things that would be legal but offensive to those around us.

93

Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent.

94

What we bring to the table is not only our 56 field offices in the United States and our number of resident agencies, but also we have 45 legal attaches overseas.

95

Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information.

96

When I was 27 years old, I organized legal aid clinics to help low-income seniors. It was a life-altering experience.

97

The ingestion of brain-altering chemicals - legal or illegal - cannot be categorized as good stewardship of our earthly lives.

98

Let's create a legal system that can work.

99

It is essential to link enterprises on the basis of objective laws of a socialist economy and legal system.

100

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

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