Common Law Quotes

• The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Life, Law, Logic

  The Common Law Lecture 1 (1881).

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• Reason is the life of the law.

  Edward Coke

  Law, Coke, Reason

  The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England bk. 2, ch. 6 (1628)

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• I'm a common law judge. I believe in deciding every case on its facts, not on a legal philosophy. And I believe in deciding each case in the most limited way possible, because common law judges have a firm belief that the best development of the law is the one that lets society show you the next step, and that next step is in the new facts that each case presents.

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Philosophy, Believe, Law

  Source: progressive.org

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• It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.

  John Ruskin

  Too Much, Littles, Pay

  "The Yale Book of Quotations". Book by Fred R. Shapiro, p. 657, 2006.

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• When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

  John Ruskin

  Littles, Pay, Too Much

  "The Yale Book of Quotations". Book by Fred R. Shapiro, p. 657, 2006.

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• Law grows, and though the principles of law remain unchanged, yet (and it is one of the advantages of the common law) their application is to be changed with the changing circumstances of the times. Some persons may call this retrogression, I call it progression of human opinion.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Law, Principles, May

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• [T]he liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature, the grandeur and glory of the public, and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skillfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England.

  John Adams

  Art, Freedom, Men

  John Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1851). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.440

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• Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reasonThe law, which is perfection of reason.

  Edward Coke

  Law, Perfection, Common

  The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England bk. 2, ch. 6 (1628)

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• Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.

  Learned Hand

  Law, Justice, Common

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Law, Presidential

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia: From 1730, to 1740; and from 1768, to 1772”, p.140

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• By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Book, Taken, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (1884). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Published by Order of Congress from the Original Manuscripts Deposited in the Department of State”

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• Christianity is part of the Common Law of England.

  Matthew Hale

  Christian, Law, England

  In 'Historia Placitorum Coronae' (ed. Sollom Emlyn, 1736)

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• And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.

  Patricia Ireland

  Men, Law, Discipline

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• Common law is common right.

  Edward Coke

  Law, Common

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• We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

  Winston Churchill

  Men, Rights, Expression

  The Sinews of Peace, delivered 5 March 1946 Westminster College, Fulton Missouri

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• There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.

  Joseph Story

  Lying, Law, Liberty

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• A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

  Walter Lippmann

  Order, Law, Common

  Walter Lippmann (1955). “Essays in the Public Philosophy”, p.106, Transaction Publishers

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• The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the new economic opportunities and provided the framework for a judicial system to protect and encourage productive economic activity

  Douglass North

  Opportunity, Men, Rights

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• We've got gays working there. If they can demonstrate long-term relationships, we make same-sex benefits available just as we do with common-law marriages. Gays are productive people. Some fly airplanes, some work in breweries.

  Pete Coors

  Sex, Airplane, Gay

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• The Bible has always been regarded as part of the Common Law of England.

  William Blackstone

  Bible, Christian, Law

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• In suits at common law, trial by jury in civil cases is as essential to secure the liberty of the people as any one of the pre-existent rights of nature.

  James Madison

  Rights, Law, People

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• ... the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Home, Gun, Law

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• It will come as no surprise to anybody to know that I support the traditional definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, as expressed in our traditional common law.

  Stephen Harper

  Men, Law, Support

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• Every British Subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament, (exclusive of all charters from the crown) entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great- Britain.

  James Otis

  Rights, Law, America

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• 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.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Law, Sky, Voice

  "Southern Pacific Company v. Jensen 244 U.S. 205, 222". Dissenting opinion, May 21, 1917.

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