A Quote by Joseph Wapner

I'm trying to demystify the whole process. Make it simple, make it palatable. I want people to have respect for the law, and I want to educate people on the basics of the law.
In war, in some sense, lies the very genius of law. It is law creative and active; it is the first principle of the law. What is human warfare but just this, - an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party. Men make an arbitrary code, and, because it is not right, they try to make it prevail by might. The moral law does not want any champion. Its asserters do not go to war. It was never infringed with impunity. It is inconsistent to decry war and maintain law, for if there were no need of war there would be no need of law.
The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.
Well, enforcement theater is OK if it's reality theater. In other words, obviously, you want to make it clear, you want to make people see that the law is being enforced.
I don't want to be treated outside the rule of law. And I don't want people from this part of the world, specifically North Africa and the Middle East, to be seen as underhumans, as people who are not deserving of human rights and being subjected to the rule of law, what I call open season. I don't want that anymore.
That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible.
The law exists for a reason. There is a dominant American culture that people used to want to preserve. That's going by the wayside, too. But if it's now okay for an illegal alien to practice law in California, then can anybody else who's broken the law get a law license? And if not, why not?
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.
All my films have some kind of statement about something - but I have to coat it with entertainment to make it palatable. Otherwise it becomes a polemic, and people don't want to see it. If you're trying to get a message out to people, you've got to entertain them at the same time.
Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.
We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
The corporations don't like open courts of law, trials by jury. They want to privatize by pushing people into compulsory arbitration where they win most of the time and the whole process is pretty secret.
Being a judge is sometimes like raising children: litigants get the time they need, not necessarily the time they want, and you have to earn people's respect by communicating to them that you're going to listen, follow the law and make a fair decision.
My job is to follow the law, not to make up the law that has been promulgated by the people or the people's representatives.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
There ought to be an onus on the people that want a law, rather than people that don`t need a new law.
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