Law
Formalism is a school of thought in law and jurisprudence which assumes that the law is a system of rules that can determine the outcome of any case, without reference to external norms. For example, formalism animates the commonly heard criticism that "judges should apply the law, not make it." To formalism's rival, legal realism, this criticism is incoherent, because legal realism assumes that, at least in difficult cases, all applications of the law will require that a judge refer to external (i.e. non-legal) sources, such as the judge's conception of justice, or commercial norms.
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Famous quotes containing the word law:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)