Joseph Story Quotes
And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice.
Story, Joseph. Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Vol. 3, Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833, p. 427.
The conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were tried, found guilty, sentenced and hanged by a military tribunal. Not everyone agreed that such a process was lawful or desirable. Bates believed also that the effect was to make martyrs of the conspirators.
The two law enforcement officers had testified that they arrested demonstrators who had “come to break the law” and had not at that point broken any laws.
The Senator was arguing against a bill to correct an aspect of the immigration law where infants and very young clildren are broght to the United States by parents who entered illegally. The children grow up in the United States—the only country and home that they have ever known. American law required that they be deported to “their countries” which they have no memory of and many do not even speak the language or know the culture. Sessions, is an example of the view that law defines justice. Therefore laws cannot be unjust nor can enforcing the law. Opponents point out that even in the United States we have, in earlier times, “enforced the law” which we came to regret and see as an injustice. The Fugitive slave laws, the Southern racial discrimination laws, and the law allowing Japanese American Citizens to be interned and lose their land during WWII are a few examples of laws, the enforcement of which is seen by most Americans as having been unjust. The execution of “witches” in early America was in conformity with the law.
This quotation shows that “due process” was an important principle for the colonists long before the American Revolution and the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Rights. Connecticut and New York passed similar laws after Massachusetts.
Joseph Story was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1812 to 1845, during the Marshall Court and early-Taney Court eras. He is most remembered for his opinions in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and The Amistad case, and especially for his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, first published in 1833. Dominating the field in the 19th century, this work is a cornerstone of early American jurisprudence. It is the second comprehensive treatise on the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and remains a critical source of historical information about the forming of the American republic and the early struggles to define its law.
