Alan Guth Quotes

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

That law is constitutional, and the Constitution authorizes nothing repugnant to the Divine law.

In reality there are two, and only two, foundations of law; and they are both of them conditions without which nothing can give it any force: I mean equity and utility.

It cannot be assumed that equity was following common law whenever they agreed, any more than the converse.

The law is immoral.

The law doesn't create a right.

Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.

Though in many other countries everything is left in the breast of the Judge to determine, yet with us he is only to declare and pronounce, not to make or new-model the law.

Anyone who takes it upon himself ... to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.

At the end of the day, we must respect the rule of law in respective jurisdictions.

No, I think that we've got a basic discrepancy here between the rule of law versus the rule of man.

Let's create a legal system that can work.

History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.

This submission is a restraint of liberty, but could be of no effect as to the good intended, unless it were general; nor general, unless it were natural.

The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.

Justice is the object of government, and those who support the government, must be agreed as to the justice to be executed by it, or they cannot rightfully unite in maintaining the government itself.

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That's the way it's done in the U.S., and that's the way it's done in Russia.

But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.

The very idea of the law in a constitutional republic involves the requisite that it be a rule, a guide, uniform, fixed and equal, for all, till changed by the same high political power which made it. This is what entitles it to its sovereign weight.

One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, today is doctrine.