Legal History Quotes

... assertions that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary ... is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character existed.

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, part of the common law.

The common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or that such a character existed.

When I started law school I was shocked to learn that our legal system traditionally had the man as the head and master of the family. As late as the '70s and '80s when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, states like Louisiana still had a head and master law.

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Medieval justice was a quaint thing.

Quid pro quo has an interesting history. It's originally a contract law term, not a criminal bribery term.

Since the thirteenth century at least,--that is, since the Magna Carta,--England has been the bulwark of modern law.

When I was starting out as a barrister in the 1980s, Lord Denning was the most famous judge in the land, and the supposed role model for every lawyer. But not for me.

After the American Revolution Alexander Hamilton wanted to study law, but there were no law books. So Hamilton wrote them.

In the fifteen years since Earl Warren became Chief Justice, the Court has brought about more social change than most Congresses and most presidents.

I am convinced that when the history of international law comes to be written centuries hence, it will be divided into two periods: the first being from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, and the second beginning with the Hague Conference.

The fact is I have never been convicted of a crime.

There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.

The base that Marshall built in law, and in tradition, transcends his life and animates the rest of American history. Part of the genius of John Marshall, is that in a very real sense, he invented the Supreme Court.

Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source

We have a lot of precedence for that; we've done that in the past. Or maybe that you want to sort of put that behind you. I don't know, that's - that's a tough decision [ seeking a special prosecutor for Hillary Clinton].

I used to walk down the Justice Department on the fifth floor and see all those portraits of legendary attorneys general, Griffin Bell and Robert Jackson and people like that. Bill Barr will not be like that.

Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history.

A judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.

By the time our Constitution was written, jury trials in criminal cases had been in existence in England for several centuries and carried impressive credentials traced by many back to Magna Carta.