Arthur Eddington Quotes

When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

Let's create a legal system that can work.

I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it's our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics.

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

The law is immoral.

A license to practice law is not a license to violate it.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.

It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principles afterward.

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

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.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

The common law of England has been laboriously built around a mythical figure—the figure of the reasonable man.

Legal doctrines ... derive meaning and content from the circumstances that gave rise to them and from the purposes they were designed to serve. To these they are bound as is a live tree to its roots

It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law. It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law.

Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life.

Bad facts make bad law.

Like other high subjects, the Law gives no ground to common sense.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

Precedents once established are so much positive power.

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

I told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table.