Topic: Law

Quotes

Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)

• A new rule or law clarifies old ambiguities but always opens up new ambiguities at its edges.#

Richard Wagner, Macroeconomics as Systems Theory (2020)

• Carl Schmitt theorized that political action had autonomy within society. This autonomy turned on the inability for any complete specification to limit executive authority.#

Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)

• Much of the development of Western law has been about ferreting out and resolving the contradictions that emerge when one tries to isolate a set of principles and apply them more broadly.#

George Mendenhall, “Law and Covenant” (1954)

• The one factor which held the [Israelite] tribes together at all was the religious bond which imposed upon them common religious obligations, not a common political law enforced by central authority.#
• Babylonian language lacks any Idiom which could be translated as “against the law”‘ or “in accordance with the law,” i.e. the written codi”ed law.#
• It is not at all likely that the Code of Hammurabi was intended to displace all other legal traditions within the Empire. At least it is quite certain that it did not do so . . . Whatever the purpose of the code, it cannot have been positive law binding all judges in their decisions, but was simply description of a legal tradition resting, it is believed, largely upon earlier collections of laws.#
• The law of an “eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” was originally a measure of protection. It contrasted originally to the Song of Lamech (Gen. 4:23-24), and is simply the classical legal policy that legal responsibility is limited to the extent of injury done.#

James Madison, “Federalist XLVII” (1788)

• A mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (1961)

• The increasing significance of legislation in almost all the legal systems of the world is probably the most striking feature of our era, besides technological and scientific progress.#
• The idea of the certainty of the law cannot depend on the idea of legislation if “the certainty of the law” is understood as one of the essential characteristics of the rule of law in the classical sense of the expression.#

Harold Demsetz, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967)

• The emergence of property rights can be understood best by their association with the emergence of new or different beneficial and harmful effects.#
• Property rights are an instrument of society and derive their significance from the fact that they help a man form those expectations which he can reasonably hold in his dealings with others.#

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

• The merits or demerits of such a change in any specific case are simply bypassed by metaphors which proceed as if “society” is doing this now and ought to do that instead – when in fact one set of decision-making units is operating under one structure of incentives now and the advantages and disadvantages of an alternative decision-making unit and the alternative set of incentives is precisely what needs to be explicitly analyzed, not covered up by metaphors about “society”.#

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)

• The man who chooses to work longer to gain an income more than sufficient for his basic needs prefers some extra goods or services he could acquire by working more. Given this, if it would be illegitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man’s leisure (forced labor) for the purpose of serving the needy, how can it be legitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man’s goods for that purpose? Why should we treat the man whose happiness requires certain material goods or services differently from the man whose preferences and desires make such goods unnecessary for his happiness? … Isn’t it surprising that redistributionists choose to ignore the man whose pleasures are so easily attainable without extra labor, while adding yet another burden to the poor unfortunate who must work for his pleasures?#
• It is ironic that pollution is commonly held to indicate defects in the privateness of a system of private property, whereas the problem of pollution is that high transaction costs make it difficult to enforce the private property rights of the victims of pollution.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944)

• The characteristic feature of a caste is its rigidity. The social classes, as Marx exemplified them in calling the capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the wage earners distinct classes, are characterized by their flexibility.#
• No progress and no reforms can be expected in a state of affairs where the first step is to obtain the consent of the old men.#

Walter Lippmann, An inquiry into the principles of the Good Society (1937)

• In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1978)

• The spontaneous character of the resulting order must therefore be distinguished from the spontaneous origin of the rules on which it rests, and it is possible that an order which would still have to be described as spontaneous rests on rules which are entirely the result of deliberate design.#

John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules” (1955)

• If one holds an office defined by a practice then questions regarding one’s actions in this office are settled by reference to the rules which define the practice. If one seeks to question these rules, then one’s office undergoes a fundamental change: one then assumes the office of one empowered to change and criticize the rules, or the office of a reformer, and so on.#

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000)

• If the written law is in conflict with the laws citizens live by, discontent, corruption, poverty, and violence are sure to follow.#
• Property is not a primary quality of assets but the legal expression of an economically meaningful consensus about assets.#

Rafael La Porta, “Judicial Checks and Balances” (2004)

• Any legal system faces a basic tradeoff between vulnerability of law enforcers to either private subversion through bribery and intimidation or public subversion through executive control.#

Richard Wagner, Mind, Society, and Human Action (2010)

• The incentive to settle varies inversely with the divergence of belief held by the disputants about the likely outcome of a trial.#
• Private property exists to the extent that third parties forbear from disputing an owner’s use of property.#

Bronisław Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)

• If the rules of custom are obeyed by the savage through sheer inability to break them, then no definition can be given of law, no distinction can be drawn between the rules of law, morals, manners, and other usages. For the only way in which we can classify rules of conduct is by reference to the motives and sanctions by which they are enforced.#
• No society can work in an efficient manner unless laws are obeyed ‘willingly’ and ‘spontaneously’. The threat of coercion and the fear of punishment do not touch the average man, whether ‘savage’ or ‘civilized’, while, on the other hand, they are indispensable with regard to certain turbulent or criminal elements in either society.#

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1949)

• The appeal to justice in a debate concerning the drafting of new laws is an instance of circular reasoning. . . . It makes sense only when approving or disapproving concrete conduct from the point of view of the valid laws of the country. In considering changes in the nation’s legal system, in rewriting or repealing existing laws and writing new laws, the issue is not justice, but social expediency and social welfare. There is no such thing as an absolute notion of justice not referring to a definite system of social organization. It is, on the contrary, the social system which determines what should be deemed right and what wrong.#

Axel Leijonhufvud, “Costs and Consequences of Inflation” (1975)

• The Law seeks to provide a stable framework of social interaction within which people can form expectations about the outcomes of their actions sufficiently firm, if not precise, to allow them to plan their conduct accordingly.#

Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results” (1984)

• The laws of the feudal states in Europe were reinforced by rules descending from Roman law (especially property law), Christian codes of conduct, and Germanic notions of loyalty and honour.#

Anthony De Jasay, The State (1985)

• Commutative justice has an agreed procedure, issuing in judgements of courts of law, for deciding which “demands of justice” should be granted. The demands of social justice, however, are not adjudicated in this way. Nobody’s judgement in social justice entails a moral obligation for somebody else to have it executed#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• Though the concept of national freedom is analogous to that of individual freedom, it is not the same; and the striving for the first has not always enhanced the second.#
• Once this identification of freedom with power is admitted, there is no limit to the sophisms by which the attractions of the word “liberty” can be used to support measures which destroy individual liberty.#
• Coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided because the only way to prevent it is by the threat of coercion.#
• The benefits I derive from freedom are thus largely the result of the uses of freedom by others.#
• To turn the whole of society into a single organization built and directed according to a single plan would be to extinguish the very forces that shaped the individual human minds that planned it.#
• Where all are made to serve the same ideals and where dissenters are not allowed to follow different ones, the rules can be proved inexpedient only by the decline of the whole nation guided by them.#
• It is nonsense to say, as is so often said, that “it is not a man’s fault that he is as he is,” for the aim of assigning responsibility is to make him different from what he is or might be. . . . We assign responsibility to a man, not in order to say that as he was he might have acted differently, but in order to make him different.#
• The assigning of responsibility does not involve the assertion of a fact. It is rather of the nature of a convention intended to make people observe certain rules.#
• Since we assign responsibility to the individual in order to influence his action, it should refer only to such effects of his conduct as it is humanly possible for him to foresee and to such as we can reasonably wish him to take into account in ordinary circumstances. To be effective, responsibility must be both definite and limited, adapted both emotionally and intellectually to human capacities.#
• If the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish.#
• We must not believe that, because we have learned to make laws deliberately, all laws must be deliberately made by some human agency.#
• The main lesson of the period of Confederation was that the mere writing-down on paper of a constitution changed little unless explicit machinery was provided to enforce it.#
• A free society demands not only that the government have the monopoly of coercion but that it have the monopoly only of coercion.#
• The law cannot effectively prohibit states of affairs but only kinds of action.#
• We must not overlook the fact that the market has, on the whole, guided the evolution of cities more successfully, though imperfectly, than is commonly realized and that most of the proposals to improve upon this, not by making it work better, but by superimposing a system of central direction, show little awareness of what such a system would have to accomplish, even to equal the market in effectiveness.#

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850)

• Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.#
• It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.#
• It is injustice, rather than justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.#
• Since law necessarily requires the support of force, its lawful domain is only in the areas where the use of force is necessary. This is justice.#

Peter Boettke, Chris Coyne, Peter Leeson, & Frederic Sautet, “The New Comparative Political Economy” (2005)

• Society functions best when the need for the policeman is the least.#

John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law” (1995)

• Once they believe that they are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings, they view their obedience to political authority as a public-spirited acceptance of the requirements of social life rather than mere acquiescence to superior power.#
• People who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law.#

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988)

• These rules, precisely by limiting the range of means that each individual may use for his purposes, greatly extend the range of ends each can successfully pursue.#
• These rules ‘are not derived from any utility or advantage which either the particular person or the public may reap from his enjoyment of any particular good‘. Men did not foresee the benefits of rules before adopting them, though some people gradually have become aware of what they owe to the whole system.#
• The disdained middleman, striving for gain, made possible the modern extended order, modern technology, and the magnitude of our current population. The ability, no less than the freedom, to be guided by one’s own knowledge and decisions, rather than being carried away by the spirit of the group, are developments of the intellect which our emotions have followed only imperfectly.#
• Relations between individuals can exist only as products of their wills, but the mere wish of a claimant can hardly create a duty for others. Only expectations produced by long practice can create duties for the members of the community in which they prevail, which is one reason why prudence must be exercised in the creation of expectations, lest one incur a duty that one cannot fulfill. #

F.A. Hayek, Liberalism (1973)

• The liberal demand for freedom is thus a demand for the removal of all manmade obstacles to individual efforts, not a claim that the community or the state should supply particular goods.#
• The decline of liberal doctrine, beginning in the 1870s, is closely connected with a reinterpretation of freedom as the command over, and usually the provision by the state of, the means of achieving a great variety of particular ends.#

F.A. Hayek, “The Moral Imperative of the Market” (1986)

• The essential basis of the development of modern civilization is to allow people to pursue their own ends on the basis of their own knowledge and not be bound by the aims of other people.#

Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (1525)

• What fear may we suppose there was among the Jews, when the Gospel freed all men from the law of Moses? What scope did not this great liberty appear to give to evil men? Yet the Gospel was not, on that account, taken away; instead, the godly were told not to use their liberty to indulge the flesh, and the ungodly were left to their own devices.#