Dean Koontz Quotes

All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.

As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it very loose, the line of the law so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

No man has ever been hanged for breaking the spirit of the law.

What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be.

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.

The law will never keep up with the machinations of the human mind.

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than the torture of laws.

They had to make their own laws in accordance with the necessities of time, and circumstances, the state of affairs, and the experience of judges.

The ancient mode of trial by jury ... ought to remain sacred and inviolable.

Judges have been deciding cases without regard for the law ever since King Solomon ruled that the contending parties should split the baby.

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

People expect that the law will be what the Supreme Court told them what the law was going to be.

It is better that the law should be certain than that every judge should speculate upon improvements in it.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

Make the law and then find a way around it.

When the laws lack clarity to the point where police officers who apply them have diverging opinions on their interpretation, can we reasonably expect that ordinary citizens can figure them out?

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

All kings of England had ever, in cases of necessity or expediency, been accustomed, at intervals, to elude them [the laws.]

When Congress writes a good law, then there are fewer lawsuits trying to interpret it.

Whatever may have been the intention of the framers of a constitution, or of a law, that intention is to be sought for in the instrument itself, according to the usual and established rules of construction.

Law that is sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from lawlessness.

'tis enough to make Laws to punish Crimes when they are committed, and not to put it in the power of any single Man, on pretence of preventing Offences to commit worse.

It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.

If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.