Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all. Maximilien Robespierre, 24th April 1793
Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract III:15
What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start. Philadelphia 1993 starring Denzel Washington & Tom Hanks & Jason Robards & Antonio Banderas & Joanne Woodward & Robert W Castle & Mary Steenburgen & Ann Dowd & Lisa Summerour & Charles Napier & Roberta Maxwell et al, director Jonathan Demme, Hanks
America – where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments. Anatole France
In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. Abigail Adams, 1744–1818, wife of John Adams & mother of John Quincy Adams
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule. Samuel Adams
A government of laws and not of men. John Adams
Ryan Giggs! RYAN GIGGS! RYAN GIGGS! You’re not secret any more. Football crowd chant May 2011 thereby breaking court super-injunction against revealing affair
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. William Blackstone
It was observed half a century ago that what is a stone wall to a layman, to a corporate lawyer is a triumphant arch. Much the same might be said of civil rights and freedoms. To the layman the Bill of Rights seems to be a stone wall against the misuse of power. But in the hands of a congressional committee, or often enough of a judge, it turns out to be so full of exceptions and qualifications that it might be a whole series of arches. Henry Steele Commager, The Right of Dissent
The Common Law of England has been laboriously built about a mythical figure – the figure of the Reasonable Man. A P Herbert, Uncommon Law
How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law. Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, 1628
Reason is the life of the law, nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason. ibid.
Law ... is the perfection of reason. ibid.
A man’s house is his castle. ibid. third part
They [corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls. Edward Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, 1658
Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign. Edward Coke, Lords' amendment to Petition of Right 17th May 1628
When an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it, and adjudge such Act to be void. Edward Coke CJ, Bonham’s Case 1610
These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as ‘the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, ‘if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves’.
That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had ‘universal jurisdiction’ statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against ‘ourselves’, or ‘our’ allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity ...
Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinean military junta, has called for George W Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – ‘one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law’ that had left the UN ‘in tatters’. He said, ‘There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay’ ...
Today, the unreported ‘good news’ is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R L Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: ‘Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter ... I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete’.
Blair, too, is safe – but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing ‘an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges’, according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E W Thomas wrote: ‘My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate’ ...
These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a ‘prayer breakfast’ with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. ‘We pray,’ said Blair, ‘that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.’ To decent people such pronouncements about Blair’s ‘faith’ represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part – or, like Alistair Campbell, his ‘communications director’, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some – might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: ‘Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, four million refugees, countless maiming and traumas’.
These are indeed extraordinary times. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘Fake Faith and Epic Crimes’; viz also website
The man on the Clapham Omnibus. Lord Bowen, as junior counsel defending Tichborne’s case 1871, adopted Greer LJ et al
When I hear of an ‘equity’ in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room – looking for a black hat – which isn’t there. Lord Bowen, attributed
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those, who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous, more or less. Edmund Burke
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. Edmund Burke
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices to your opinion. Edmund Burke
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge. Edmund Burke
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Edmund Burke, attributions & variations, viz John Stuart Mill, University of St Andrew address 1st February 1867
cf.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing. John Stuart Mill, address University of St Andrews 1st February 1867
All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. John Stuart Mill