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.
Read more about this topic: Formalism (philosophy)
Famous quotes containing the word law:
“Who does not know history’s first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Faith, I have been a truant in the law,
And never yet could frame my will to it,
And therefore frame the law unto my will.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)