Legal Disobedience Quotes

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

Musharraf has just gone against the constitution and displayed contempt of court and has shown that he has no respect for the rule of law.

All of us know that if an individual, a community, or a state is going continuously and successfully to defy the rulings of the courts, then anarchy results.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

In very rare circumstances, the executive branch might choose to ignore a court decision.

Our country is being radically altered, step by step, by Justices who are not following any law.

If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant’s natural God-given unalienable or Constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.

We don’t intend to let [Ireland] default from the rule of law at the behest of ruthless conspiracy. The disrespect for law rooted there tends to spread like a cancer to other places. I will take the sternest measures to stop the spread of that cancer elsewhere...

I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people. You can get no troops from North Carolina.

The right response when, in the army, you are given an unlawful order, is to refuse that order. The right response of a chief executive in this state and in this nation, when faced with an order by a court that he conscientiously believes violates the constitution he is sworn to respect, is to refuse their order!

When juries refuse to convict on the basis of what they think are unjust laws, they are performing their duty as jurors..