INCOME TAXES In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax, for ex. ample, merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception—couched in abstract terms that offer no handle to seize hold of—leave, in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness.
—HAND, Learned, in Dilliard, Irving, The Spirit of Liberty
LAW
A colleague of mine at the Harvard Law School with whom I got into a tangle about some question of law once chided me, indeed, closed a contentious argument between us by saying, “You take law awfully seriously.”
I said, “That’s one accusation against which I plead guilty without reservation.”
I am bound to say hardly another member of the Harvard Law faculty would have thought of making an accusation. I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.
—FRANKFURTER, Felix, in Phillips, Harlan B., Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (New York: Reynal and Company, 1960), p. 189.
Aaron Burr:
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.
Francis Bacon:
Laws are like cobwebs where the small flies were caught and the great break through
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