Quotes by Law Professors

It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.
Samuel Moyn
In order to be a teacher you've got to be a student first
Gary L. Francione
One reason current discussions of justice are so impoverished is that our heterogeneous society does not have many shared texts. Shakespeare's plays are among the few secular texts that remain common enough and complex enough to sustain these conversation. His answers to our dilemmas may not "bear on all points." Yet they teach us not to underestimate the action of the flower.
Kenji Yoshino
I reject animal welfare reform and single-issue campaigns because they are not only inconsistent with the claims of justice that we should be making if we really believe that animal exploitation is wrong, but because these approaches cannot work as a practical matter. Animals are property and it costs money to protect their interests; therefore, the level of protection accorded to animal interests will always be low and animals will, under the best of circumstances, still be treated in ways that would constitute torture if applied to humans.By endorsing welfare reforms that supposedly make exploitation more “compassionate” or single-issue campaigns that falsely suggest that there is a coherent moral distinction between meat and dairy or between fur and wool or between steak and foie gras, we betray the principle of justice that says that all sentient beings are equal for purposes of not being used exclusively as human resources. And, on a practical level, we do nothing more than make people feel better about animal exploitation.
Gary L. Francione
If “piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission- if “if value, then right” is true- then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of “big media” today- film, records, radio, and cable TV-was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation’s pirates join this generation’s country club-until now.
Lawrence Lessig
There are some animal advocates who say that to maintain that veganism is the moral baseline is objectionable because it is “judgmental,” or constitutes a judgment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism and a condemnation that vegetarians (or other consumers of animal products) are “bad” people. Yes to the first part; no to the second. There is no coherent distinction between flesh and other animal products. They are all the same and we cannot justify consuming any of them. To say that you do not eat flesh but that you eat dairy or eggs or whatever, or that you don’t wear fur but you wear leather or wool, is like saying that you eat the meat from spotted cows but not from brown cows; it makers no sense whatsoever. The supposed “line” between meat and everything else is just a fantasy–an arbitrary distinction that is made to enable some exploitation to be segmented off and regarded as “better” or as morally acceptable. This is not a condemnation of vegetarians who are not vegans; it is, however, a plea to those people to recognize their actions do not conform with a moral principle that they claim to accept and that all animal products are the result of imposing suffering and death on sentient beings. It is not a matter of judging individuals; it is, however, a matter of judging practices and institutions. And that is a necessary component of ethical living.
Gary L. Francione
She had been carried away by the need to defend herself.
Stephen L. Carter
She wasn't being methodological. She was being autobiographical.
Stephen L. Carter
They loved the sound of their own voices. No decision would be reached anytime soon.
Stephen L. Carter
But, like all metaphoric wars, the copyright wars are not actual conflicts of survival. Or at least, they are not conflicts for survival of a people or a society, even if they are wars of survival for certain businesses or, more accurately, business models. Thus we must keep i mind the other values or objectives that might also be affected by this war. We must make sure this war doesn't cost more than it is worth. We must be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price we're willing to pay.
Lawrence Lessig
Ethical veganism represents a commitment to nonviolence.
Gary L. Francione
He was the sort of man who only wanted to be told what he already assumed was true.
Stephen L. Carter
Veganism is not a "sacrifice." It is a joy.
Gary L. Francione
We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience.
Gary L. Francione
In time of war, it is not enough to say, ‘I am a citizen and I have rights.’ One must also say, ‘I am a citizen and I have obligations.
Kermit Roosevelt III
If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all “on our own journey,” then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all “on our own journey” and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context.
Gary L. Francione
Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she shares this vision of nonviolence. Ethical veganism is anything but passive; on the contrary, it is the active refusal to cooperate with injustice
Gary L. Francione
I feel an emptiness open in my chest, coupled with a strange downward pull in my throat. I think, this is my heart sinking.
Kermit Roosevelt III
He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies.
Stephen L. Carter
...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...
Rosa Brooks
Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.
Gary L. Francione
The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.
Gary L. Francione
Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.
Jeffrey Rosen
It is unlikely that we will hit a home run anytime soon but if we are unable to get rid of offensive sports team nicknames, we will strike out.
Adam Dodek
So many people of liberal persuasion value their own progressive opinions more than they value the people they hold those opinions about.
Stephen L. Carter
I never wanted to be safe, I wanted to be good.
Kermit Roosevelt III
What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)
Rosa Brooks
We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.
Gary L. Francione
On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
Stephen L. Carter
Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.
Lawrence Lessig
Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.
Samuel Moyn
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we carry forward the basic insight our fundamental relationship to the world is one of love. Christians say that “God is Love,” that God created the universe out of love. The source of God’s Creation is love, and our relationship to the possibility of meaning within this created world is in and through love. The Christian community is a reciprocal relationship among subjects who love and are loved. The subject maintains the meaning of God’s Creation by taking up a Christ-like love toward others. The appearance of meaning in the world—love’s product—is always a manifestation of the divine. Liberalism turns away from this entire tradition of thought, in party because of its association with religion, and in part because this tradition resists the analytic form of reason. For liberalism, religion is individualized and privatized, and thus it cannot be used in the explanation or justification of a public space. If it does invade the public, it threatens irrationality. But religion is no less an effort to understand the character of our experience, and even a secular philosophy must not ignore that experience. We cannot simply deny what we cannot place within our categories of analysis. (221)
Paul W. Kahn
I never wanted to safe... I wanted to be good.
Kermit Roosevelt III
I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.
Gary L. Francione
Better to wait actively than passively.
Stephen L. Carter
As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform ad they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack. . . . This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle.
Rosa Brooks
I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops. If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually.
Rosa Brooks
To say that a being who is sentient has no interest in continuing to live is like saying that a being with eyes has no interest in continuing to see. Death—however “humane”—is a harm for humans and nonhumans alike.
Gary L. Francione
We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull.
Richard C. Wydick
An abolitionist is, as I have developed that notion, one who (1) maintains that we cannot justify animal use, however “humane” it may be; (2) rejects welfare campaigns that seek more “humane” exploitation, or single-issue campaigns that seek to portray one form of animal exploitation as morally worse than other forms of animal exploitation (e.g., a campaign that seeks to distinguish fur from wool or leather); and (3) regards veganism, or the complete rejection of the consumption or use of any animal products, as a moral baseline. An abolitionist regards creative, nonviolent vegan education as the primary form of activism, because she understands that the paradigm will not shift until we address demand and educate people to stop thinking of animals as things we eat, wear, or use as our resources.
Gary L. Francione
While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence.
Rosa Brooks
It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world
Rosa Brooks
Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. At some point, you have to decide who you are and what matters morally to you. And once you decide that you regard victimizing vulnerable nonhumans is not morally acceptable, it is easy to go and stay vegan
Gary L. Francione
Many at the State Department think its their job, not the Army's, to develop cultural and regional expertise and relationships. In such quarters, the RAF concept looks less like an innovative approach to global risk management than yet another military effort to replace diplomats with soldiers.
Rosa Brooks
It is difficult to trust someone not raised to doctrine.
Stephen L. Carter
Of course, men often 'use their economic superiority to gain sexual advantages,' but women often use their sexual superiority to gain economic advantages. So who is the extortionist?
David P. Bryden
From the front row of the balcony, I look out over the Uptown Cinema. The red velvet seats are emptying, the credits scrolling up the screen. Ginger Rogers married a Nazi, but Cary Grant got her out of it. Their ship is sailing to America; sun burns away the fog and the wind blows free. Now they are gone and I am coming back to reality, breathing a harsher air. It is how I always feel when a movie ends.
Kermit Roosevelt III
The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait.
Stephen L. Carter
If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift.We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be.We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.
Gary L. Francione
Size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.
Stephen L. Carter
Forty-two years after Dr. King was murdered, we are still a nation of inequality. People of color, women, gays, lesbians, and others are still treated as second-class citizens. Yes, things have changed but we have still not achieved equality among all humans. And nonhuman animals continue to be chattel property without any inherent value.
Gary L. Francione
Most fundamentally, the U.S. military is—and will continue to be—a product of our culture and our collective decisions. Whatever it is, it's what we have made it.
Rosa Brooks
[L]ove ... privileges another to see us in ways that would shame us and disgust others without the intervention of love.
William Ian Miller
I never wanted to be safe... I wanted to be good.
Kermit Roosevelt III
You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan.
Gary L. Francione
This isn't about your reputation. Our job right now is to make sure that there to ARE future historians.
Stephen L. Carter
He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst.
Stephen L. Carter
Speciesism is morally objectionable because, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, it links personhood with an irrelevant criterion. Those who reject speciesism are committed to rejecting racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination as well.
Gary L. Francione
Teachers seeking to 'teach the controversy' over Darwinian evolution in today's climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise questions about Darwinism, or who try to elicit from the teacher an honest answer about the status of intelligent design theory will trigger administrators' concerns about whether they stand in Constitutional jeopardy. A chilling effect on open inquiry is being felt in several states already, including Ohio. South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. [District Court] Judge Jones's message is clear: give Darwin only praise, or else face the wrath of the judiciary.
David K. DeWolf
Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.
Stephen L. Carter