Montesquieu Quotes
The laws do not take upon them to punish any other than overt acts.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of Laws. Translated by Thomas Nugent, J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, 1752, p. 286.
Until very recently common law derived from this law allowed a thief on someone else’s property to be killed even with no danger to the property owner. In Texas and other jurisdictions the “unwritten” law would not convict such a killer for murder even if he came upon a trespasser who was stealing nothing. Today, the legal principle is that deadly force may only be used if the person reasonably believed his life was in danger and had no other means of escape.
This law is used to free “honor killing” murderers who have killed female relatives for what they thought was a sexual transgression that “stained the family honor.” The custom exists in some other countries but rarely with such sanction of law. In the case of Article 548 the word “witnesses” is interpreted to mean “heard about it” or even has some reason to suspect it. Each year in Syria hundreds of innocent women, and even girls are killed with impunity. In one 2007 case a 15 year old girl was kidnapped and raped. When she was freed by the police she was jailed. A cousin got her released by agreeing to marry her, but after the marriage, one of her own brothers, with the knowledge and concurrence of the rest of the family, butchered her with a knife. The family then held a party to celebrate the cleansing of their honor.
There is always a tendency of legislators to attempt to legislate morality. Many people used this quotation to question the religiously supported laws like blue laws, cursing, nudity and the like.
Slaves could not own property in most of Southern America. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Germans, the Poles, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French had provided, both by law and by custom, for the possession of property by the slave, which could, not be seized by his master. This is another sense in which American slavery was even worse than most slavery had been.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, and political philosopher.
