Quotes by Legal Scholars

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.
Stanley Fish
The golden ratio, as well as the Great Pyramid as an expression of it, is an important key to our universe containing the Earth and the Moon. ... The ratio between the Earth and the Moon is in fact the basis for the mathematical concept of 'squaring the circle' ...
Willem Witteveen
The sense that just about anything goes with the collection of public revenues and the making of public expenditure has contributed mightily to the current malaise.
Richard A. Epstein
The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.
Cass R. Sunstein
Protectionist measures may permit domestic industries to thrive, which under free trade would wither in the face of cheap imports. Imports may be opposed by the government in the public interest--for example because it thinks it imprudent to rely upon foreign suppliers of certain strategic goods such as staple foods, energy, or military equipment, or because it wishes to nurture an infant industry as yet too weak to compete internationally, or because it wishes to preserve traditional industries such as fishing in order to preserve employment and local communities.
Vaughan Lowe
What I have called the internal morality of law is in this sense a procedural version of natural law, though to avoid misunderstanding the word "procedural" should be assigned a special and expanded sense so that it would include, for example, a substantive accord between official action and enacted law. The term "procedural" is, however, broadly appropriate as indicating that we are concerned, not with the substantive aims of legal rules, but with the ways in which a system of rules for governing human conduct must be constructed and administered if it is to be efficacious and at the same time remain what it purports to be.
Lon L. Fuller
We shall succeed only so far as we continue that most distasteful of all activity the intolerable labour of thought.
Learned Hand
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.
Learned Hand
Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit.
Richard A. Epstein
The pillars of classical liberalism call for flat taxes, with revenues put to limited uses; strong property rights; and free markets.
Richard A. Epstein
It might also count as an insult to dignity, and a form of infantilization, if the government constantly reminds people of things that they already know.
Cass R. Sunstein
Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In heaven there will be no law, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.
Grant Gilmore
There is only one universal language, which is the language of numbers and proportions that are so striking and stunningly built into the Great Pyramid and to which our current science has no appropriate response. We can no longer ignore that this ancient civilization was aware of our units used in modern mathematics and physics and were even aware of our metric system. Our metric system originating in the eighteenth century, designed and implemented by a committee of mathematicians and physicists commissioned by the French revolutionary government.
Willem Witteveen
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.
Learned Hand
Indeed, if the Framers intended unenumerated rights to be protected without a bill of rights, how can we imagine that those rights were meant to be any less secure with a bill of rights.
Roger Pilon
Law ... begins when someone takes to doing something someone else does not like.
Karl Llewellyn
From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths. I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history. How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world.
Patricia J. Williams
The law must be stable and yet it must not stand still.
Roscoe Pound
Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.
Cass R. Sunstein
Where I am today has everything to do with the years I spent hanging on to a career by my fingernails.
Barbara Aronstein Black
Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.
Zechariah Chafee Jr.
That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services.
Richard A. Epstein
From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths.I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history.How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world.
Patricia J. Williams
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
Learned Hand
When rogues fall out honest men get into their own.
Sir Matthew Hale
The desire to avoid short-term hardships leads to major dislocations in [housing] markets.
Richard A. Epstein
If changing judges changes law, then it is not clear what law is.
Judge Richard A. Posner
Who stole the livery of the court of Heaven To serve the Devil in.
Frederick Pollock
The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.
Learned Hand
the perhaps rather prosaic truth that law is an imperfect yet indispensable vehicle by which both to conserve and transform society
Raymond Wacks
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.
Patricia J. Williams
If government is to respect people's autonomy, or to treat them with dignity, it should not deprive them of freedom. It should treat them as adults, rather than children or infants.
Cass R. Sunstein
the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Stanley Fish
The art of publicity is a black art.
Learned Hand