Law Application Quotes

One of the things about being a law student is that the academic discipline of law is very often removed from the practical reality of law. How to complain, who to complain to, and whether or not you even need to invoke the law is very different in the real world from how it's examined in the lecture theatre.

You will read in the newspaper more often about federal courts, but the law that affects people, the trials that affect human beings are by and large in the state courts.

The law is hard but it is the law.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.

If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.

We cannot forget the need to use the law as a shield, but we must remember other forces of the law.

Though in many other countries everything is left in the breast of the Judge to determine, yet with us he is only to declare and pronounce, not to make or new-model the law.

During my time as a judge, as a justice, and as attorney general, I've had one overarching goal, and that is a strict interpretation and application of the laws and the Constitution. I would be Madisonian.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

Before we condemn the jurors who acquitted George Zimmerman, we should remember that they were asked to do something extraordinary. They were asked to listen to the facts and apply the law to the best of their ability in a case the world was watching.

To me there's nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn't apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn't work.

There is an international law just as there has always been a law against theft, but because the thief gets away with his booty at times is no reason why we should say that the law against theft has been abrogated.

For all laws are general judgments, or sentences of the legislator; as also every particular judgment is a law to him whose case is judged.

God forbid that the defendant should not be allowed the benefit of every advantage he is entitled to by law.

It would then be most admirably adapted to the purposes of justice, if laws properly enacted were, as far as circumstances admitted, of themselves to mark out all cases, and to abandon as few as possible to the discretion of the judge.

The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation's interests and enforcing its laws - all of them, not just selective ones - in a manner worthy of the department's name.

No law made after a fact done, can make it a crime.

For every criminal case, the judge must construct a perfect syllogism: the major premise must be the general law; the minor premise, whether or not the action in question is in compliance with the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment.

The law rarely hesitates in declaring its own meaning; but the Judges are frequently puzzled to find out the meaning of others.

The law in its majesty prohibits rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.

Reason we call that faculty innate in us of discovering laws and applying them with thought.

My job is to take the law as it's given to me and enforce it and implement it faithfully.

I have no hesitation in applying a law regardless of what I might think about it.

The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.