John Marshall Quotes

When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights. The people can act only by their agents and, within the powers conferred upon them, their acts must be considered as the acts of the people.

A man's 'original and natural right' to make all contracts that are 'intrinsically obligatory,' and to coerce the fulfillment of them, is one of the most valuable and indispensable of all human possessions.

Someone who signs a contract must respect it.

Not that pleading can be taken as a test, for the forms of action, notably Debt, ignore the fundamental difference between duties imposed by law and duties created by the will of the parties.

It took a long time to get out of my contract. The producers thought I was negotiating for more money.

A married woman has the same natural right to acquire and hold property, and to make all contracts that she is mentally competent to make reasonably, as has a married man, or any other man.

In terms of the legal matter of creating a contract between two people that's called marriage, and allowing them to live together with the protection of law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country.

Circumstances may require a dissolution of contracts founded on the most binding and sacred obligations…which dissolution ought not to be dependent on private will, but should require legislative interference; inasmuch as the republic is deeply interested in the private business of its citizens.

In some portions of the country there was, and is, an aggregation of property, and vested rights are in the foreground.

A repeated problem with the Obama administration has been the lack of understanding that contracts only matter if they are enforceable - and if there is a party willing to do the enforcement.

Requiring forced arbitration agreements limits consumer rights and protections.

It is impossible to unsign a contract, so do all your thinking before you sign.

A treaty is only another name for a bargain: and that it would be impossible to find a nation who would make any bargain with us, which would be binding on them absolutely, but on us only so long as and so far as we may think proper to be bound by it ... treaties are made not by one of the contracting parties but by both, and consequently that as the consent of both was essential to their formation at first, so must it ever afterwards be to alter or cancel them.

International treaties have escape clauses. If you don’t like the way its going, you give the requisite notice, and you get out.

All contracts, not in opposition to the laws of the State, that have been entered into in foreign countries, between emigrants who come to settle in this State, or between the inhabitants thereof, and the servants and day laborers or workingmen whom they introduce, are hereby guaranteed to be valid in said State

The modern civilized State has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, which has transformed primitive Society into Civilization.

All citizens have the right to engage in industrial and commercial occupations. This right is founded on: (1) The right to hold property in houses, including the right to sell them, … (2) The right to make contracts with local authorities to build on urban and rural land, with the right of ownership for 49 years. (3) The right to own houses, factories and workshops, industrial and commercial undertakings, machinery, and means of production, agricultural and industrial property, financial capital. (4) The right to mortgage these properties or to borrow money on land. (5) The right to inventions, trade marks, and author’s royalties. (6) The right of married people and their children to testamentary or legal inheritance, up to 10,000 gold rubles, the right of legal enforcement of contracts.

When a party shall make bond or conveyance, what he has named by word-of-mouth that shall hold good

A slave cannot make a contract, not even the contract of matrimony.

The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal. It takes a broader view to-day. A promise may be lacking, and yet the whole writing may be "instinct with an obligation," imperfectly expressed. If that is so, there is a contract.

I would beg the wise and learned fathers (of the church) to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration. ... [I]t is not in the power of professors of the demonstrative sciences to alter their opinions at will, so as to be now of one way of thinking and now of another. ... Demonstrated conclusions about things in nature of the heavens, do not admit of being altered with the same ease as opinions to what is permissible or not, under a contract, mortgage, or bill of exchange.

Only free men can negotiate: prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.

Law is the safest helmet; under the shield of the law no one is deceived.

In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.

Even if you have a contract you can be sold.