Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko Quotes
We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk... a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidelines but with considerations of "higher justice”.
The law was against stealing corn from a farm of field, There was a tradition in Russia that no one should be jailed for corn stealing unless he stole 5 or more ears of corn. However, many people repeatedly helped themselves to 4 ears, and the party wanted it stopped. What is fascinating is that his insistence that the law as promulgated by the Party be enforced literally without regard to issues of higher justice such as starvation and necessity, placed him in the same legal posture as the capitalist countries which also insisted that the laws be enforced and not tempered by higher moral issues of fairness. Whoever has the power to make the laws wants them to be enforced literally. Most others want them tempered by issues of justice, fairness, and necessity.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko, 1885–1938, Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet Politician, People's Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General, Speech, January 1933
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time he was not an official of the bar association.
It is surprising that these ideas would come from one of the most autocratic powerful monarch in the world at the time. However there were many very liberal influences on her from Europe. This set of proposals she even sent to Voltaire to get his feedback and criticism.
Law enforcement is as important as the laws themselves.
“Familia” in Latin meant in this context, the community or the citizens as opposed to the officials, The Bishop determined the former was under attack by the officials who in the probating of wills and estates would take bribes or levy taxes under “laws” that they would make up on the spot bilking the rightful inheritors of the property and wealth of the deceased. The principle that laws and regulations must be written down in advance and not otherwise, is a fundamental part of Western law today, But as this quotation shows, it was not always such.
The Senator was arguing against a bill to correct an aspect of the immigration law where infants and very young clildren are broght to the United States by parents who entered illegally. The children grow up in the United States—the only country and home that they have ever known. American law required that they be deported to “their countries” which they have no memory of and many do not even speak the language or know the culture. Sessions, is an example of the view that law defines justice. Therefore laws cannot be unjust nor can enforcing the law. Opponents point out that even in the United States we have, in earlier times, “enforced the law” which we came to regret and see as an injustice. The Fugitive slave laws, the Southern racial discrimination laws, and the law allowing Japanese American Citizens to be interned and lose their land during WWII are a few examples of laws, the enforcement of which is seen by most Americans as having been unjust. The execution of “witches” in early America was in conformity with the law.
The Senator was referring to the immigration laws which many, including him, thought were unjust, unfair, racist and discriminatory.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko was an Old Bolshevik and Soviet politician. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet legal system, rising to become People's Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. He was executed during the Great Purge.
