See Also: LAWYERS

1. Corpuses, statutes, rights and equities are passed on like congenital disease —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2. Exact laws, like all the other ultimates and absolutes, are as fabulous as the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end —G. N. Lewis
3. Going to law is like skinning a new milk cow for the hide, and giving the meat to the lawyers —Josh Billings

   The original in Billings’ popular dialect form reads as follows: “Going tew law iz like skinning a new milch … .tew the lawyers.”

4. Great cases like hard cases make bad law —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

   Justice Holmes expanded on his simile as follows: “For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”

5. Law is a bottomless pit —John Arbuthnot

   Arbuthnot continues as follows: “It is a cormorant, a harpy that devours everything!”

6. Law is a form of order, and good law must necessarily mean good order —Aristotle
7. The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket —Charles Macklin
8. The law is like apparel which alters with the time —Sir John Doddridge
9. Law is like pregnancy, a little of either being a dangerous thing —Robert Traver
10. The law often dances like an old fishwife in wooden shoes, with little grace and less dispatch —George Garrett

    In Garrett’s historical novel, Death of the Fox, this simile is voiced by Sir Francis Bacon.

11. Laws and institutions … like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time —Henry Ward Beecher
12. (Written) laws are like spiders’ webs; they hold the weak and delicate who might be caught in their meshes, but are torn in pieces by the rich and powerful —Anarchis

    The spiders’ web comparison to the law has been much used and modified. Here are some examples: “Laws, like cobwebs, entangle the weak, but are broken by the strong;” “Laws are like spiders’ webs, so that the great buzzing bees break through, and the little feeble flies hang fast in them” (Henry Smith); “Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through” (Jonathan Swift); “Laws, like cobwebs, catch small flies, great ones break through before your eyes” (Benjamin Franklin); “Laws, like the spider’s web, catch the fly and let the hawk go free” (Spanish proverb).

13. Law should be like death, which spares no one —Charles de Secondat Montesquieu
14. Laws, like houses, lean on one another —Edmund Burke
15. Laws should be like clothes. They should fit the people they are meant to serve —Clarence Darrow
16. Laws wise as nature, and as fixed as fate —Alexander Pope
17. Legal as a Supreme Court decision —Anon
18. Legal studies … sharpen, indeed, but like a grinding stone narrow whilst they sharpen —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
19. Liked law because it was a system like a jigsaw puzzle, whose pieces, if you studied them long enough, all fell into place —Will Weaver
20. The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect, that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good —Charles Caleb Colton
21. Suits at court are like winter nights, long and wearisome —Thomas Deloney
22. To try a case twice is like eating yesterday morning’s oatmeal —Lloyd Paul Stryker

    See Also: REPETITION, STALENESS

23. Violations of the law, like viruses, are present all the time. Everybody does them. Whether or not they produce a disease, or a prosecution, is a function of the body politic —Anon quote, New York Times/Washington Talk, November 28, 1986