As an instrument for practical action, law is responsive to the wisdom of its time, which may be wrong, but it carries forward, sometimes in opposition to this wisdom or passion, a memory of received values.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.
The practice of law requires both continuity and growth - a deep understanding of legal principles born of reason, tradition, and experience and tested by time, but also a mind alert to present needs and the future consequences of public and private legal decisions.
To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.
The will to set values and the power to make them law are jointly at the bottom of all operative norms. When linked to divine wisdom, this source of moral law is still in safe hands which man can trust.
Commitment to the rule of law provides a basic assurance that people can know what to expect whether what they do is popular or unpopular at the time.
A law is a law, and it has to be respected.
There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.
Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture.
Law builds upon and, I should like to claim, is one of the liberal arts. It uses words of persuasion and changing definitions for practical ends.
It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.