Quotes & Sayings About Jurists

middle of the 12th century, Gratian composed a legal synthesis entitled Concordantia discordantium canonum [Concordance of Conflicting Canons]. It is better known as the Decretum. This work, considered as a corpus iuris canonici (a code containing the then-effective ecclesiastical laws), became a model for later jurists who added to it. — Stephen F. Brown

The judges of England have rarely been original thinkers or great jurists. Many have been craftsmen rather than creators. — Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Government is defined as a right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the common good, as the jurists' texts would have said, but to an end which is 'convenient' for each of the things that are to governed. This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, government will have t ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, that the population in enabled to multiply, etc. There is a whole series of specific finalities, then, which become the objective of government as such. In order to achieve these various finalities, things be disposed - and this term, [i] dispose [/i], is important because with sovereignity the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim - that is to say, obedience to the laws - was the law itself; law and sovereignity were absolutely inseparable. — Michel Foucault

Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish. — Soren Kierkegaard

John Finnis observed that, since there is no doctrine of subjective rights in Aquinas and there is such a doctrine in Suarez, a "watershed" must be situated somewhere between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. But this view rests on the fallacy, widespread among modern jurists and philosophers who are not medieval specialists, that if an idea is not to be found in Aquinas it is not really a medieval idea at all. — Brian Tierney

I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world. — Dahlia Lithwick

Brett Kavanaugh is a brilliant, brilliant judge and one of the most-distinguished conservative jurists in the country. — Donald Verrilli Jr.

My sense is that jurists from other nations around the world understand that our court occupies a very special place in the American system, and that the court is rather well regarded in comparison, perhaps, to their own. — Sandra Day O'Connor

From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal," Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record of fatalities. "No other poison causes so many deaths or leads to or intensifies so many diseases, both physical and mental, as does [this] alcohol in the many forms in which it is taken. — Deborah Blum

Discernment and detachment (Jurists and apatheia) are two characters of the mature Christian soul. They are not yet the mark of a mystic, but they bear witness that one is traveling the right way to mystical contemplation, and that the stage of beginners is passed. The presence of discernment and detachment is manifested by a spontaneous thirst for what is good - charity, union with the will of God - and an equally spontaneous repugnance for what is evil. The man who has this virtue no longer needs to be exhorted by promises to do what is right, or deterred from evil by threat of punishment. — Thomas Merton

As a legal text, the Qur'an reflects its origins in a tribal or clan-based society, particularly on issues concerning inheritance, male guardianship, the validity of a woman's testimony in court, and polygamy. This is even more obvious in the hadith, the compilation of sayings attributed to the Prophet or documenting his actions. This combination of the Qur'an and the example of Muhammad forms the basis of sharia. The derivation of these legal rules, known as fiqh, is the responsibility of Islamic jurists and takes place on the basis of ijma (consensus). When conflicts of interpretation arise, scholars consult the Qur'an and hadith. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Judge Samuel Alito was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey. Our state has a legacy of producing outstanding jurists, most notably the late William J. Brennan, who ushered in our nation's recommitment to civil rights in the latter half of the 20th century. — Frank Lautenberg

Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science. — Horace Mann

When jurists and business men assert that the depreciation of money has a very great influence on all kinds of debt relations, that it makes all kinds of business more difficult, or even impossible, that it invariably leads to consequences that nobody desires and that everybody feels to be unjust, we naturally agree with them. In a social order that is entirely founded on the use of money and in which all accounting is done in terms of money, the destruction of the monetary system means nothing less than the destruction of the basis of all exchange. Nevertheless, this evil cannot be counteracted by ad hoc laws designed to remove the burden of the depreciation from single persons, or groups of persons, or classes of the community, — Ludwig Von Mises

There are four main sources of the Shari'a: the Koran, which is compiled of thousands of religious verses revealed by God through his Prophet, Mohammed; the Sunna, which are the traditions the Prophet addressed that are not recorded in the Koran; the Ijma, which are the perceptions of the Ulema, or religious scholars; and the Qiyas, which is a method whereby known jurists agree upon new legal principles. — Jean Sasson

What most impresses us about great jurists is not their tenacious grasps of fine points, honed almost to invisibility; it is the moment when we are suddently aware of the sweep and direction of the law, and its place in the lives of men. — Irving Kaufman

in our democratic societies, there is nothing that is not regulated. Arab jurists taught me something that I liked very much. They represent law as a sort of tree, with at one extreme what is forbidden and, at the other, what is obligatory. For them, the jurist's role is situated between these two extremes: that is, addressing everything that one can do without juridical sanction. This zone of freedom never stops narrowing, whereas it ought to be expanded. — Anonymous

As our friend Zach has often noted, in our days those who do the best for astronomy are not the salaried university professors, but so-called dillettanti, physicians, jurists, and so forth.Lamenting the fragmentary time left to a professor has remaining after fulfilling his teaching duties. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

Fiscal considerations have led to the promulgation of a theory that attributes to the minting authority the right to regulate the purchasing power of the coinage as it thinks fit. For just as long as the minting of coins has been a government function, governments have tried to fix the weight and content of the coins as they wished. Philip VI of France expressly claimed the right "to mint such money and give it such currency and at such rate as we desire and seems good to us" and all medieval rulers thought and did as he in this matter. Obliging jurists supported them by attempts to discover a philosophical basis for the divine right of kings to debase the coinage and to prove that the true value of the coins was that assigned to them by the ruler of the country. — Ludwig Von Mises

Think about that: at a time when it was inconceivable to have a woman rabbi or a woman scholar of Christian theology or canon law, the Islamic civilization boasted hundreds of women who were authorities in Islamic law and Islamic theology and that taught some of the most famous male jurists and left behind a remarkable corpus of writings. — Khaled Abou El Fadl

Jurists, with rare exceptions, are unconsciously and tenaciously averse to clarity and brevity. — Gianrico Carofiglio

A philosophy which speaks, even indirectly, only to philosophers is no philosophy at all; and I think the same is true if it speaks only to scientists, or only to jurists, or priests, or any other special class. — Abraham Kaplan

The error arises from the learned jurists deceiving themselves and others, by asserting that government is not what it really is, one set of men banded together to oppress another set of men , but, as shown by science, is the representation of the citizens in their collective capacity. — Leo Tolstoy

If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness. — Thomas Jefferson

Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality. — Ezra Pound

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself. — Adrienne Rich

It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists. — Conrad Black

The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians. — Timothy Noah

There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

After 25-plus years as a lawyer, prosecutor, and defense attorney, I have developed a deep appreciation for both the wisdom of the law and the role that jurists play in framing the rights and responsibilities that define our society. — Eliot Spitzer

Islamic tradition is full of examples of supporting the autonomy of women and the empowerment of women. Very few people know that in Islamic history there have been well over two thousand women jurists. — Khaled Abou El Fadl

The Holy Scriptures surpass in efficaciousness all the arts and all the sciences of the philosophers and jurists; these, though good and necessary to life here below, are vain and of no effect as to what concerns the life eternal. — Martin Luther