Charles Edward Merriam Quotes

The law doesn't create a right.

There is no such thing as "natural rights;" there are only adjustments of conflicting claims.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.

Principle I: Legal rights are presumptive rights.

I'm a civil rights attorney. I'm a victim rights attorney.

All persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic ….

When I went to law school, I went to learn about justice and equal rights.

Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

Human rights must be protected by the rule of law, and there can never be occasions where human rights can be neglected or ignored or the rule of law set aside.

Rights are either God-given or evolve out of the democratic process. Most rights are based on the ability of people to agree on a social contract, the ability to make and keep agreements.

There are two laws discreteNot reconciled,Law for man, and law for thing.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

Common law is common right.

Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.

For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.

The Law ... is perfection of reason.

We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

For [Louis] Brandeis, it's not a technical question of channeling what would James Madison say. It's how do we take these inherent human natural rights of liberty and translate them into an age of new technolog

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

Right... is the child of law.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

The three basic material rights -- continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.