Topic

Law

Law in this collection is most interesting when it is being questioned. Ovid's opening aphorism — what is lawful is undesirable, what is unlawful is very attractive — is a description of human psychology as accurate now as when it was written. Aristotle offers the counter-ideal: the only stable state is one in which all men are equal before the law, a standard no state has fully met. Bierce defines a lawyer as one skilled in circumvention — a description that is either a joke or a job posting depending on who's reading. Quintilian formalizes Ovid's insight: forbidden pleasures are loved immoderately; when lawful, they lose their charge. Rogers on income tax and lying is the American democratic complaint that the law produces the behavior it nominally forbids. Twain on press freedom laws that protect nobody from the press completes the irony: law is most visible when it fails. What the collection refuses is the civics-textbook account of law as neutral mechanism. Law is political, contingent, and administered by people with interests. Aristotle's ideal and Bierce's reality sit side by side without resolution.

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Lawyer: One skilled in circumvention of the law

Source: The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Law is common force organized to prevent injustice.

Source: The Law (1850), What Is Law?

It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws.

Source: The Law (1850), What Is Law?

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law

The income tax has made more liars out of more Americans than golf has.

Taxes are the price that we pay for a civilized society

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties

There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable.

Source: Up from Slavery (1901)

The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.

Source: The Law (1850), What Is Law?

The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes - naked greed and misconceived philanthropy.

Source: The Law (1850), The Perversion of Law

It has acted in direct opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object.

Source: The Law (1850), The Perversion of Law

It has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it.

Source: The Law (1850), The Perversion of Law

Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.

Source: The Law (1850), What Is Law?

It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our works, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments.

Source: The Law (1850), The Law and Education

The law, then, is solely the organization of individual rights that existed before law.

Source: The Law (1850), Summary proposition

What is lawful is undesirable; what is unlawful is very attractive