America is a nation of laws, and it is wrong for Congresswoman Markey to propose bending the rules for a group of people whose first act in this country was to break the law.
Since the '86 amnesty, the number of illegal immigrants has quadrupled. That should teach Congress a very important lesson: Amnesty 'bends' the rule of law. And bending the rule of law to reach a 'comprehensive' deal winds up provoking wholesale breaking of the law.
It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies.
The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.
A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.
Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.
Instead of saying we need to outlaw certain types of weapons, we need to find better ways to enforce current law.
I think it is likely that within every department there are some officers who subtly, if not otherwise, are biased in the way they go about enforcing the law. I think that is just life. We know that to be true.
The greatest block today in the way of woman's emancipation is the church, the canon law, the Bible and the priesthood.
Not a law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment as a lawyer when I earned my degree.
From the law firm's perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client's perspective, it doesn't work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases.
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
Changing from biochemistry to law was easy because I was rubbish in the laboratory. I could never decide how much to put in a test tube because I'm not very good at maths.
We got Defense of Marriage Act as a federal law from President Bill Clinton. And it was passed with bipartisan support.
Congress should pass a law repealing birthright citizenship for children of foreign citizens, with the sole exception being children of legal permanent residents. Children born to business travelers, foreign students, tourists, and illegal aliens would not be automatically citizens of the United States.
I just find it absolutely bizarre that we are being lectured by the Americans about giving up our sovereignty and giving up control when the Americans won't even sign up to the international convention on the law of the seas, let alone the International Criminal Court.
Law enforcement's biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the 'paddy wagon.' The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.
This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.
In 1986, Pakistan got the blasphemy law. So, while we had just two cases of blasphemy before that year, now we have thousands. It shows that one should be careful while bringing religion into legislation, because the law itself can become an instrument of persecution.
