Legal Tyranny Quotes

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

Government power is always abused by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this.

There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master

[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .

The very concept of law that protects us from tyranny has been lost. No longer the people's shield, law has become a weapon in the hands of government.

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?

Thus, if there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law. Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.

I am not about to be a party to anything having to do with the law that is going to destroy individual freedom and liberty in this country.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than the torture of laws.

It is not possible in the nature of things to establish religion by human laws without perverting the design of civil law and oppressing the people.

Of all injustice, that is the greatest which goes under the name of law, and of all sorts of tyranny the forcing of the letter of the law against the equity, is the most insupportable.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

The judges’ individual sense of justice ... might result in a benevolent despotism if the judges were benevolent men. [But] It would put an end to the reign of law

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.

People’s lives and fortunes have been relinquished to renegade judges, a robed contemptuous elite.

And I take this opportunity to declare, that... I will to my dying day oppose with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery on the one hand, and villainy on the other, as this writ of assistance is. It appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, - the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book.