SOLON & other law commentary
Solon (594 B.C.), when asked how social justice could be
achieved in Athens, said, "We can have justice whenever
those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged
by it as those who have been."
National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.
William E. Gladstone (1809-1898) English statesman
Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for
the benefit of the people of the country is considered a
radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing
to endure disaster. William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
American newspaper publisher.
"The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but
the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign
that can be identified..."
HOLMES, J., (dissenting), Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen (1917)
244 US 205, 222, 61 LEd 1086, 1101, 37 S Ct 524
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin, 20 years before the Bill of Rights
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one
who is striking at the root. Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
A republic is not an easy form of government to live under,
and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded,
democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over.
Earl Warren, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It", p 13
The only protection of every citizen from such deprivation
of rights is a strict adherence to the Bill of Rights by
everyone for everyone. This should be self-evident but the
danger of erosion of rights stems largely from the fact that
so many citizens of the majority, who have never been
deprived of any of these rights, find it difficult to
understand what the deprivation of them means in the lives
of others." Earl Warren, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It",
p. 48
The Constitution of the U.S.S.R., adopted in 1936, and as
amended in 1965, contains the following provisions:
"Article 125. In conformity with the interests of the
working people, and in order to strengthen the Socialist
system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law;
(a) freedom of speech; (b) freedom of the press; (c) freedom
of assembly including the holding of mass meetings; (d)
freedom of street expressions and demonstrations."
"Article 124. In order to ensure to citizens freedom
of conscience, the church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from
the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of
religious worship and freedom of antireligious propaganda is
recognized for all citizens."
"Article 127. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed
inviolability of the person. No person shall be placed
under arrest except by decision of a court of law or with
the sanction of a procurator."
"Article 122. Women in the U.S.S.R. are accorded all
rights on an equal footing with men in all spheres of
economic, government, culture, politics and other social
activity."
"Article 123. Equality of rights of citizens of the
U.S.S.R., irrespective of their nationality or race in all
spheres of economic, government, culture, politics and other
social activity is an indefeasible law."
How similar these sections are to our Bill of Rights,
with its guarantees of freedom of speech, of the press, of
association, of the right to petition the government, the
right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Yes, how similar these constitutional privileges are, but
how different the quality and the reality of the life of the
two peoples living under them.
The reason, of course, is apparent. In the U.S.S.R.
the government is supreme and omnipresent in every respect,
with the rights of individuals subordinated to it. The
people have no way to enforce the language of their
Constitution. Most of the declared freedoms are
inaccessible to them.
In the United States the people are sovereign. The
powers of the government are only those delegated to it by
the people. The democratic process, by definition, is one
in which "The supreme power is vested in the people and
exercised by them or by their elected agents under a free
electoral system."
Earl Warren, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It", pp. 60-61
"Dissent," then, should be an honored word, and all citizens
should be encouraged to engage in it. The opposite of
dissent is conformity, and nothing could be more deadly than
to have conformity for the sake of conformity.
Earl Warren, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It", pp. 104
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact
amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with
both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom
they suppress.
Frederick Douglass
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