Legal Jurisdiction Quotes

It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision.....you have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy.

The military tribunals currently underway at Guantanamo Bay create a clear legal process, as affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, for adjudicating the cases of these terrorists, when possible. Those efforts would be severely undercut by moving the detainees to the United States.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command.

They had no right, as it seems to me, to prosecute me in these Halls; nor have you the right in law or under the Constitution, as I respectfully submit, to take jurisdiction over offenses committed against them.

It is not my call ... it is not for the judicial branch to decide.

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.

An American citizen is not going to be extradited to Japan for saving whales.

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

We're going after the possibilities of tax fraud, insurance fraud, securities fraud. We're going to look at this stuff very closely. We have the jurisdiction, we have the resources, and we have the will.

Private courts, Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes Thrilled by some female vendor's scream, belike The very shrillest of all London cries, May then entangle our impatient steps; Conducted through those labyrinths, unawares, To privileged regions and inviolate, Where from their airy lodges studious lawyers Look out on waters, walks, and gardens green.

There is certainly nothing anomalous in punishing the crime of murder differently in different jurisdictions.

In England and, later, the United Kingdom, Habeas Corpus is a right of great antiquity: Anyone who is arrested must be brought before a court, but this does not apply in continental countries.

I don't think I have committed a crime outside the domain of the US.

Barack Obama would never accept a court in Mexico decreeing what the law in the United States would be.

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

It is an established principle of jurisprudence in all civilized nations that the sovereign cannot be sued in its own courts, or in any other, without its consent and permission; but it may, if it thinks proper, waive this privilege, and permit itself to be made a defendant in a suit by individuals, or by another State.

No controlling legal authority

Well, they really didn't have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can't do anything. Look, there's one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that's the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

Well, let's see. There's-of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but...

Of course you got rights, the law's on your side, but sometimes the law takes a long time to kick in and so it gets put in the hands of us poor suckers on duty. You get my drift?

You understand that, by making these records available to you I do not acknowledge that you or any grand jury have any right to records of the Vice President. Nor do I acknowledge the propriety of any grand jury investigations of possible wrongdoing on the part of the Vice President as long as he occupies that office. These are difficult constitutional questions which need not at this moment be confronted.

I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness for your sins from God, but not from the Minister of Justice. There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

No individual or company, no matter how large or how profitable, is above the law.