Legal quotations

Page 3

◆ The more laws that are created, the closer we get to lawlessness.

- J.S.B. Morse99

◆ Harming one's unalienable rights in order to serve justice is injustice.

- J.S.B. Morse99

◆ And that's the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that's done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that's the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.

- William M. Kunstler99

◆ The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism.

- Carl Schmitt99

◆ Law firms can create environments for abusive relationships. This is especially true if an attorney has no self-direction, has no independent means of financial support, and has massive student loan indebtedness. You've basically made yourself an indentured servant.

- Robin D. Hart99

◆ Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

- Nicolas Chamfort99

◆ Change cannot and will not happen overnight. But the intent to evolve will produce opportunities for growth.

- Robin D. Hart99

◆ Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

- Michael Salter99

◆ All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be 'Girl A' - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn't. It was about me. I am Girl A.

- Girl A99

◆ Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other care-givers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organised, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

- Michael Salter99

◆ Legality has become a poisonous dagger, with which one party stabs the other in the back.

- Carl Schmitt99

◆ The difference between politics and religion is that the first makes it legal to hate, and makes the love of the second illegal.

- Rebecca McKinsey99

◆ Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

- Plato99

◆ Obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character.

- Robert E. Lee99

◆ I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.

- Daniel Goleman99