3, Sussex Terrace, Hawthorn, South Australia 5062
Telephone: (+ 61 8) 8172 1222
Facsimile: (+ 61 8) 8127 9553
Contact
Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power. Particularly should this freedom be employed in comment upon the work of the courts, who are without many influences ordinarily making for humour and humility, twin antidotes to the corrosion of power.
[Frankfurter J (1941)]
Good men must not obey the laws too much.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
[Richard Nixon]
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been reason.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]
Let us remember that if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.
[Samuel Adams]
No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we 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 favour.
[Theodore Roosevelt]
The law . . . will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations and wanton tempers of men. . . . On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder, to the clamours of the populace.
[John Adams]
Nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
[The Constitution of the United States of America]
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
[Mark Twain]
Any government is free to the people under it where the laws rule and the people are a party to the laws.
[William Penn]
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
[James Madison]
There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.
[Fred Rodell]
While law is supposed to be a device to serve society, a civilized way of helping the wheels go round without too much friction, it is pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.
[Fred Rodell]
In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day.
[Fred Rodell]
It is an honorable calling that you have chosen. Some of you will soon be defending poor, helpless insurance companies who are constantly being sued by greedy, vicious widows and orphans trying to collect on their policies. Others will work tirelessly to protect frightened, beleaguered oil companies from being attacked by depraved consumer groups.
[Art Buchwald]
You cannot live without lawyers, and you certainly cannot die without them.
[Joseph H. Choate]
Necessity knows no law; I know some attorneys of the same.
[Benjamin Franklin]
A man who never graduated from school might steal from a freight car. But a man who attends college and graduates as a lawyer might steal the whole railroad.
[Theodore Roosevelt (attempting to persuade his son to become a lawyer)]
The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.]
The bar does not claim to be the communion of saints. It only claims to be a noble organization of fallible men, in a fallible society. It concedes that all lawyers sometimes blunder in a professional service; that many sometimes sin against professional duty; that some are incompetent and some are vicious. But it asserts its own dignity and integrity, by a greater contempt than the world has for its dunces, by a severer reprobation of its knaves.
[Edmund G. Ryan]
True, we build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.
[John W. Davis]