Legal Purpose Quotes

All laws are promulgated for this end: that every man may know his duty; and therefore the plainest and most obvious sense of the words is that which must be put upon them.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

Most of the Ten Commandments are negative. The purpose of law is not to mandate good behavior. That concept comes from the French Revolution.

The aim of the law is not to punish sins, but is to prevent certain external results.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

The final cause of law is the welfare of society.

Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain - and since labor is pain in itself - it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it. When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor. It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder instead of to work. All the measures of the law should protect property and punish plunder.

The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.

Some lawyers and judges may have forgotten it, but the purpose of the court system is to produce justice, not slavish obedience to the law.

Those who believe that... detailed rules originate in a certain cause, are as far from the truth as those who assume that the whole law is useless.

A wise judge, by the craft of the law, was never seduced from its purpose.

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

I don't view prosecutors and attorneys as natural enemies. ... Though their roles are oppositional, the two simply have different roles to play in pursuit of the larger purpose, realizing the rule of law. ... This is not to deny that the will to win drives those efforts. ... Rather, it is simply to insist that ultimately, neither the accused nor society is served unless the integrity of the system is set above the expedient purposes of either side.

Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

Law is made for man and not man for the law. Wherever we can be sure that the most valuable interests of a nation require that we should decide one way, that way we ought to decide.

Lawyers serve a purpose, and we couldn't operate as society without them. They can make things more complicated and difficult, but there are certain times where the need for them is crucial to an argument or an event or an issue.

The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.

I think people are great in many different ways. So, I think some justices are great because they have extraordinary wisdom, they have an understanding of how to apply the law in their times in a way that's completely consistent with the text of the law and the purposes of the law, and in a way that's completely right for the times in which they live in.

The most universal and effectual way of discovering the true meaning of law, when the words are dubious, is by considering the reason and spirit of it; or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it. for when this reason ceased, the law itself ought likewise to cease with it.