Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.
~ Azarias

Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
~ Francis Bacon

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.
~ Walter Bagehot

Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
~ Anacharsis

Law is a bottomless pit.
~ John Arbuthnot

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
~ Hannah Arendt

The law is reason, free from passion.
~ Aristotle

I have enforced the law against killing certain animals and many others, but the greatest progress of righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings.
~ Asoka

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them, who obeys them.
~ Ward Becker

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

Every law is an infraction of liberty.
~ Jeremy Bentham

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
~ Jeremy Bentham

The law is light.
~ Bible

Where there is no law there is no transgression.
~ Bible

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.
~ Otto Von Bismarck

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.
~ Bertolt Brecht

A lawyer starts life giving $500 worth of law for $5 and ends giving $5 worth for $500.
~ Benjamin Brewster

A lawyer is a gentlemen that rescues your estate from your enemies and then keeps it to himself.
~ Lord Henry P. Brougham

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.
~ Edmund Burke

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.
~ Edmund Burke