The Hammock Papers: law

Showing posts with label law. Show all posts

26 April 2025

Alert.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, from Olmstead v. U.S. (1928)

Obeyed.

The alternative to power is law: law freely accepted and freely obeyed. Only by observing the rule of law – law that applies equally to the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless – do we escape the tragic cycle of freedom that begets conflict that leads to chaos, resulting in the use of force that generates tyranny, the freedom of the few and the enslavement of the many. God reveals Himself in the form of law, because law is the constitution of liberty. That is the moral shape of a society of freedom under the sovereignty of God.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, from Essays on Ethics

13 July 2021

Themselves.

No man is above the law and no man is below it; we don't ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor. Men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others.

Theodore Roosevelt

16 June 2020

Assuming.

The American Spectator considers the consequences of defunding the police ...

In the heat of the moment, no plan seems necessary for simultaneously getting rid of cops and keeping the public safe. It’s just going to happen: assuming you believe in grand overhauls of a human disposition regarded over the centuries as less than consistently “sweet” or “nice.”

While we’re waiting for it to happen, we might hold up to the light an irony or two in terms of workability. The defund cause comes from the left, the same political quarter from which proceeds the movement to restrict or abolish the right to carry guns. Thus, along with the invention of a new, no-cops world goes the disarming of those most doubtful of the whole notion. These people you’re going to talk into leaving their doors unlocked at night while their national leaders work to abolish “systemic racism.” Uh-huh.

CONNECT

04 June 2020

Equal.

October 24, 1770. Boston, Massachusetts.

John Adams’ client, Captain Thomas Preston, was probably the most hated man in Boston, at least among those agitating for American independence.

Seven months earlier, Preston led a handful of British soldiers (a.k.a. redcoats) to the King’s Custom House to protect a fellow solider being attacked by a large group of irate Colonists. Though details are sketchy, in the end, the soldiers fired into the crowd and six colonists lay dead, with five wounded.

Preston and the soldiers were immediately arrested and American patriots sprang into action. Some Colonists portrayed the events as an unprovoked attack and named it the “Boston Massacre.” Paul Revere made his famous engraving showing Preston and the soldiers firing callously into the crowd. Tensions between the British and Americans were at an all-time high.

But despite the perilousness of the situation, several men—like John Adams—stepped forward to ensure that the soldiers were provided a proper legal defense in court. It didn’t matter to Adams that his clients were hated British soldiers, or that Massachusetts could soon be at war with these very men. In his eyes, all individuals deserved to be treated equally in the eyes of the law. He would help enshrine this dedication for our country.

Adams was a respected lawyer, statesman, and future president of the United States, but he risked his reputation and the wrath of his countrymen to ensure justice was delivered fairly. It would not be the first time he displayed his commitment to the equal protection of the law.

CONNECT

31 May 2020

Halt.

We must have law and order on our streets and in our communities, and it is the responsibility of the local and state leadership, in the first instance, to halt this violence. The Department of Justice (including the FBI, Marshals, ATF, and DEA), and all of our 93 U.S. Attorneys across the country, will support these local efforts and take all action necessary to enforce federal law.

In that regard, it is a federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting. We will enforce these laws.

CONNECT

02 April 2020

Instantly.

A Locrian who proposed any new law stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.

Edward Gibbon, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

CONNECT

09 February 2020

Sheep.

CONNECT

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL