U.s. Legal System Quotes & Sayings

I was in my late twenties and about to start my fourth year at the SPDC when I met Walter McMillian. His case was one of the flood of cases I'd found myself frantically working on after learning of a growing crisis in Alabama. The state had nearly a hundred people on death row as well as the fastest-growing condemned population in the country, but it also had no public defender system, which meant that large numbers of death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind. — Bryan Stevenson

Class action lawsuits are an important part of our legal system. All citizens should have the right to band together and settle grievances with bigger companies, but that system is broken and it needs fixing. — Thomas Carper

Even if we didn't have a single person in the USA in violation of immigration laws, we'd still have to do immigration reform, because our legal immigration system is broken. It's not good for anybody. — Marco Rubio

This is the most frightening lesson of the Cultural Revolution: Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. This is as true now as it was then. Thirty — Ji-li Jiang

In case after case, President Bush's actions have made American women less safe and less secure
on the job and on the streets. As president, I will put American government and our legal system back on the side of women. I will stand up for their security, ensure their safety, support their rights, and guarantee their dignity. This nation can do no less. — John F. Kerry

You're never going to have a legal immigration system that works if you grant amnesty. — Marco Rubio

Muslims have to give up three things if they want to become Europeans: They have to bid farewell to the idea of converting others, and renounce the Jihad. The third thing they need to give up is the Shariah, which is the Islamic legal system. — Bassam Tibi

The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil. — Thomas Szasz

I think we need a real plan, which is why I have offered a much more specific approach to securing the border, fixing the legal immigration system and addressing illegal immigration. — Carly Fiorina

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law. — Judith Lewis Herman

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other. — Hannah Arendt

Auguste Comte, in particular, whose social system, as unfolded in his Systeme de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though by moral more than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers. — John Stuart Mill

Ranger is one of the few civilians in Trenton with a permit to carry concealed. He owns office buildings in Boston, has a daughter in Florida by a failed marriage, has worked worldwide as a mercenary, and has a moral code that isn't entirely in sync with our legal system. I have no idea who the heck he is . . . but I like him. — Janet Evanovich

I think immigration system that we have is terrible for the United States of America. We have a legal immigration system that does not work. It does not reflect the economic needs of this country in the 21st century. It needs to be modernized. — Marco Rubio

I miss New York. I like the country and I like the people. However, the U.S. political and legal system is prone to overreaction. — Marc Rich

I think that we should give visas to people - green cards, rather, to people who graduate with skills that we need. People around the world with accredited degrees in science and math get a green card stapled to their diploma, come to the U.S. of A. We should make sure our legal system works. — Mitt Romney

Let's create a legal system that can work. — Sam Brownback

I want to set the record straight."
"The record's never straight, you idiot! Haven't you ever read 1984? They rewrite the record anytime it doesn't suit them. You're spinning your wheels and exposing your bare fanny for nothing. — David Eddings

I've led a school whose faculty and students examine and discuss and debate every aspect of our law and legal system. And what I've learned most is that no one has a monopoly on truth or wisdom. I've learned that we make progress by listening to each other, across every apparent political or ideological divide. — Elena Kagan

The U.S. legal system is organized as an adversarial contest: in civil cases, between two citizens; in criminal cases, between a citizen and the state. Physical violence and intimidation are not allowed in court, whereas aggressive argument, selective presentation of the facts, and psychological attack are permitted, with the presumption that this ritualized, hostile encounter offers the best method of arriving at the truth. — Judith Lewis Herman

The U.S. immigration system is the most generous in the world, providing each year more green cards for legal permanent residence with a clear path to full citizenship than all the rest of the nations of the world combined. — Jan C. Ting

Seemingly by design, the American legal system encourages defense counsel to be as mendacious as possible. As Monroe Freedman, a legal ethicist and former dean of Hofstra Law School, has written, "The attorney is obligated to attack, if he can, the reliability or credibility of an opposing witness whom he knows to be truthful." It's an essential component of our adversarial system of justice, based on the theory that justice is best achieved not through a third-party investigation directed by an impartial judge but, instead, through vigorous disputation by the interested parties: trial by verbal combat. The — Jon Krakauer

For me, taking the sort of dry principles of the law and bringing them into contact with human beings ... it's like you jump into hyperspace. And everything that's dull about the books and the theory becomes provocative. — Michael Ponsor

There are very few things you can really do [to promote] healthy aging ... and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system. All those things do is change who pays. — Alan Russell

I feel like there was justice. It was served through the legal system you know. Everything that I endured. It was all worth it. — Amber Frey

I describe what is happening as 'food fascism' because this system can only survive through totalitarian control. With patents on seed, an illegitimate legal system is manipulated to create seed monopolies. Seed laws that require uniformity - which criminalize diversity and the use of open-pollinated seeds - are fascist in nature. Suing farmers after contaminating their crops is another aspect of this fascism. Pseudo-hygiene laws that criminalize local, artisanal food are food fascism. And attacks on scientists and the silencing of independent research are examples of knowledge fascism. — Vandana Shiva

Fed role - legal system, currency & defense, within its means. — Pat Toomey

Democracy is not possible without effectively working legal system. — Vladimir Putin

Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession. — Ludwig Von Mises

The system isn't working when 12 million people live in hiding, and hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids - when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel. When all that's happening, the system just isn't working. — Barack Obama

Under theocracies and other authoritarian regimes, the rulers are the moral authorities. Under genuine democracy some basic values are entrenched in the legal system, which is expected to be under democratic vigilance, and others are left to the person or the group, which ideally debate moral problems in a rational, free and cooperative manner. — Mario Bunge

The acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice. — Lee Kuan Yew

The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done. — Lawrence Lessig

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. — Matthew Yglesias

We have a legal system, and this is not something that happens all the time. We have capital punishment. America has capital punishment. Iran has capital punishment. Iran hangs people and leaves their bodies hanging on cranes. Iran put to death more than a thousand people last year. I don't see EU reporting on it. — Adel Al-Jubeir

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. — Jackson Burnett

Lawsuits should not be used to destroy a viable and independent distribution system. The solution lies in the marketplace and not the courtroom. — Don Henley

We don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective ... We haven't been able to require every employer to enter a system in which they check the work status of their employees and determine whether they're legal, and without that, we don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective. And that would be the single greatest additional weapon we could use if we're serious about tackling this problem. — Michael Chertoff