Law

Law makes us distinct from the rest of the creatures. Read these riveting opinions on law from prominent Blacks in society.

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

He who lives outside the law is a slave. The free man is the man who lives within the law, whether that law be the physical or the divine.
Booker T. Washington

I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in ?We, the people?.
Barbara Jordan

If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Thurgood Marshall

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
Martin Luther King, Jr

Jurors who are opposed to capital punishment are more likely to believe that a defendant's failure to testify is indicative of his guilt, more hostile to the insanity defense, more mistrustful of defense attorneys and less concerned about the danger of erroneous convictions.
Thurgood Marshall

Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.
Thurgood Marshall

My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Barbara Jordan

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
Thurgood Marshall

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.
Thurgood Marshall

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
Eldridge Cleaver

We the people -- it is a very eloquent beginning. But when the Constitution of the United States was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ?We the people?.
Barbara Jordan