PRESIDENTS
AND OTHER POLITICAL LEADERS
"It was the boast of Augustus that
he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much nobler
will be the sovereign's boast when he shall have it to say that he found
law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book and left it a living
letter; found it the patrimony of the rich and left it the inheritance of
the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression and left it
the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence."
Henry
Peter Brougham Lord Chancellor of England,
1845
"Loyalty to the principles upon which our Government rests positively
demands that the equality before the law which it guarantees to every
citizen should be justly and in good faith conceded in all parts of the
land"
President
Grover Cleveland
Second
Inaugural Address, March 4, 1893
"Any man who seeks to deny equality among all his
brothers betrays the spirit of the free and invites the mockery of the
tyrant."
President Dwight David Eisenhower
Inaugural Address, 1953
"The first duty of society is
justice."
Alexander Hamilton
"All,
too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the
majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be
reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law
must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
President Thomas
Jefferson
First Inaugural Address,
March 4, 1801
"Equal
and exact justice to all persons of whatever state or persuasion, religious or
political...freedom of person under the protection of the law; and trial by
juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation
which has gone before us, and guided our steps.... They should be the creed of
our political faith -- the text of civil instruction – the touchstone by which
to try the services of those we trust."
President Thomas
Jefferson
"The poor man looks upon the law as
an enemy, not as a friend. For him the law is always taking
something away. " Attorney
General Robert Kennedy
Law Day Speech, May 1, 1964
"Helplessness does not stem from
the absence of theoretical rights. It can stem from an inability to
assert real rights. The tenants of slums, and public housing
projects, the purchasers from disreputable finance companies, the minority
group member who is discriminated against -- all these may have legal
rights which--if we are candid--remain in the limbo of the law." Attorney
General Robert Kennedy
Law Day Speech, May 1, 1964
"The great
essential to our happiness and prosperity is that we adhere to the principles
upon which the Government was established and insist upon their faithful
observance. Equality of rights must prevail....[T]he integrity of the
courts, and the orderly administration of justice must continue forever the
rock of safety upon which our Government securely rests."
President William McKinley
Inaugural Address, 1897
"As
lawyers, our first responsibility is, of course, to see that
the legal profession provides adequate representation for all people in our
society. I would suggest there is no subject which is more important to the
legal profession, that is more important to this nation, than...the realization
of the ideal of equal justice under law for all."
President
Richard
Nixon
Speech to
the National Legal Aid and Defender
Association
October 1962
"The American people stand firm in the faith which has inspired this
Nation from the beginning. We believe that all men have a right to
equal justice under law and equal opportunity to share in the common
good."
President
Harry
S. Truman
Inaugural
Address, 1949
"Justice, sir, is the great
interest of man on this earth. It is the ligament which holds
civilized beings and civilized nations together."
Daniel Webster, September 12, 1845
"Justice, and only justice, shall
always be our motto."
President Woodrow Wilson Inaugural
Speech, March 14, 1913
"The feelings
with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our
heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and
mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one."
President Woodrow Wilson Inaugural
Speech, March 14, 1913
"The firm basis
of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of
justice. There can be no equality of opportunity, the first
essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be
not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of
great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control,
or singly cope with."
President Woodrow Wilson Inaugural
Speech, March 14, 1913
"The first duty of
law is to keep sound the society it serves."
President Woodrow Wilson Inaugural
Speech, March 14, 1913
"Justice has nothing to do
with expediency."
President Woodrow Wilson,
February 26, 1916
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JUDGES,
ON AND OFF THE BENCH
"There
can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the
amount of money he has."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo
Black
Griffin v.
Illinois, 373 U.S. 12,(1964)
"Reason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary
system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor
to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is
provided for him. This seems to us to be an obvious truth."
U. S.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black
Gideon v.
Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 344 (1963)
"The
Fourteenth Amendment, in declaring that no State 'shall deprive any person
of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,'
undoubtedly intended . . .
that equal protection and security should be given to all [and] they should
have like access to the courts of the country for the protection of their
persons and property, the prevention and redress of wrongs, and the
enforcement of contracts...."
U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Steven Field
Barbier v.
Connolly, 113 U.S. 27, 35 (1885)
“If
the motto ‘and justice for all’ becomes ‘and justice for those who
can afford it’, we threaten the very underpinnings of our social
contract.”
Chief
Justice Ronald George
California
Supreme Court
Annual
“State of Judiciary” Speech, 2001
"Imperfect as was the ancient common-law system, harsh as it was in
many of its methods and measures, it would strike one with surprise to be
credibly informed that the common-law courts...shut their doors
upon...poor suitors...Even greater would be the reproach to the system of
jurisprudence of the state of California if it could be truly declared
that in this twentieth century...it had said the same thing."
California
Supreme Court Justice Frederick Henshaw, Martin v. Superior Court, 176 Cal.289, 294
(1917)
"In respect of civil rights, all
citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the
most powerful."
U. S Supreme Court
Justice John Harlan Plessey v
Ferguson [dissent], 163 U.S. 537,
559-560 (1896)
"Perhaps
no characteristic of an organized and cohesive society is more fundamental
than its erection and enforcement of a system of rules...enabling [its
members] to...settle their differences in an orderly, predictable
manner. Without such a 'legal system,' social organization and
cohesion are virtually impossible...[I]t is this...that allows society ot
reap the benefits of rejecting what political theorists call the 'state of
nature.'
"Without this guarantee that one may not be deprived of his rights,
neither liberty nor property, without due process of law, the State's
monopoly over techniques for binding conflict resolution could hardly be
said to be acceptable under our scheme of things. Only by providing that
the social enforcement mechanism must function strictly within these
bounds can we hope to maintain an ordered society that is also just."
Supreme Court Justice John Harlan [Jr.] Boddie
v. Connecticut, 401 U.S. 371, 374-75 (1971)
"Whatever disagreement there may be
as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be
no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with
opportunity to be heard.
U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes Frank v Mangum, 237 U.S. 309, 347
(1915)
“The rule of law
does not mean that the protection of the law must be available only to a
fortunate few or that the law should be allowed to be prostituted by
vested interests for protecting and upholding the status quo under the
guise of enforcement of civil and political rights.
The poor too have civil and political rights and the rule of law is
meant for them also, though today it exists only on paper and not in
reality.”
Supreme
Court of India
PUDR
v. Union of India (AIR 1982 SC 1473, 1477)
"Equal
justice under law is not just a caption on the facade of the Supreme Court
building. It is perhaps the most inspiring ideal of our society . .
. It is fundamental that justice should be the same, in substance and
availability, without regard to economic status." U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, Jr.
"Equality before the law in a true
democracy is a matter of right. It cannot be a matter of charity or
of favor or of grace or of discretion."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley
Rutledge
Speech to American
Bar Association,
September 29, 1941
"Poverty or wealth can make all the differences in
securing the substance or only the shadow of constitutional
protections."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley B.
Rutledge Foster v.
Illinois, 332 U.S. 134. 142 (1947) dissenting opinion
"The real practical blessing of our
Bill of Rights is in its provision for fixed procedure securing a fair
hearing by independent courts to each individual...But if the individual
in seeking to protect himself is without money to avail himself of such
procedure, the Constitution and the procedure made inviolable by it do not
practically work for the equal benefit of all. Something must be
devised by which everyone, however lowly and however poor, however unable
by his means to employ a lawyer and pay court costs, shall be furnished
the opportunity to set fixed machinery of justice going." William Howard
Taft
Chief
Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
Preface to Smith and Bradway, LEGAL AID WORK
IN THE UNITED STATES (1926)
"Without expressing a final
personal conclusion on the subject, it seems to me that ultimately these
instrumentalities [legal aid] will have to be made part of the
administration of justice and paid for out of public funds."
William Howard Taft
Chief Justice, U.S.
Supreme Court
Forward to "Legal Aid Work", THE ANNALS, Volume CXXIV, page iv (1926)
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Legal
Aid Leaders, Bar Leaders, and other Lawyers
"Lawyers must be activists to leave
a contribution to society. The law is more than a control; it is an
instrument for social change. The role of the OEO Legal Services
Program is to provide the means within the democratic process for the law
and lawyers to release the bonds which imprison people in poverty, to
marshal the forces of law to combat the causes and effects of
poverty." E. Clinton
Bamberger, first Director of the OEO Legal Services Program, Speech to
National Legal Aid and Defender Association, November 18, 1965
"If you will accept bold ideas, new
theories, courageous innovation, and disputed principles with an open and
inquisitive mind and a renewed commitment to make the law an instrument of
advantage for disadvantaged people, we will be a significant
generation."
E.
Clinton Bamberger, first Director of the OEO Legal Services Program,
Speech to National Legal Aid and Defender Association, Scottsdale,
Arizona, November 18, 1965
"Our responsibility is to marshal
the forces of law and the strength of lawyers to combat the causes and
effects of poverty. Lawyers must uncover the legal causes of
poverty, remodel the system which generates the cycle of poverty and
design new social, legal, and political tools and vehicles to move poor
people from deprivation, depression, and despair to opportunity, hope, and
ambition." E. Clinton
Bamberger, first Director of the OEO Legal Services Program, Speech to
National Conference of Bar Presidents, Chicago, Illinois, February 8, 1966
"Nine tenths of you are in jail
because you did not have a good lawyer and, of course, you did not have a
good lawyer because you did not have enough money to pay a good
lawyer."
Clarence Darrow, Address to prisoners
in Cook County Jail, 1902
"The legal profession owes it to
itself that wrongs do not go without a remedy because the injured has no
advocate....Does the lawyer ask, who is my neighbor? I answer---the
poor man deprived of his just dues."
Charles Evans Hughes, Speech to the
American Bar Association, August, 1920
"It has been correctly said that
respect for the law is at its lowest with underprivileged persons. There
is a natural tendency for such persons to think of the courts as symbols
of trouble and of lawyers as representatives of creditors and other
sources of 'harrassment.'"
ABA
President Lewis Powell, Speech to American Bar Association House of
Delegates, August 14, 1964
"If we
were to take command of the moral forces which are now stirring
throughout the nation, we shall find public opinion ready to fight
staunchly at our side. Let us assume that leadership by declaring
here and now that henceforth within the field of law the mighty power of
the organized American Bar stands pledged to champion the rights of the
poor, the weak, and the defenseless."
Reginald Heber Smith, speech to the American Bar
Association, August, 1920
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HISTORIANS,
PHILOSOPHERS, AND WRITERS
"Eventually,...the
higher law of the modern constitution may become the guarantor of positive
laws that make the modern right to legal aid fully effective. If
such a point is ever reached, the modern world will have given a truly
'legal' answer to the legal problems of the poor, who will no longer have
to depend upon the powerful, as they did under the 'political' answer of
the Romans, nor upon the merciful, as they did under the 'charitable'
answer of the Middle Ages."
Professor
Mauro Cappelletti, TOWARD EQUAL JUSTICE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LEGAL AID
IN MODERN SOCIETIES (1975) page 75
"Don't I think a poor man has a chanst
in coort? Iv coorse he has. He has th' same chanst there that he has
outside. He has a splendid, poor man's chanst."
Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley on the
Choice of Law 168, 173 (1963)
"The law, in its
majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the
streets, and to steal bread -- the rich as well as the poor." Anatole
France Crainquebille, 1902
"To such a height th' Expence
of courts is gone,
That poor Men are redress'd -- till they're
undone."
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's
Almanack, 1734
"Equality is equity."
Richard
Francis Maxims of Equity, 1728
"The safety of
the people requireth further, from him, or them that have the Sovereign
Power, that Justice be equally administered to all degrees of
People; that is, that as well the rich, and mighty, as poor and obscure
persons, may be righted of the injuries done them; so as the great, may
have no greater hope of impunity, when they doe violence, dishonour, or
any Injury to the meaner sort, than when one of these, does the like to
one of them: For in this consisteth Equity; to which, as being a Precept
of the Law of Nature, a Sovereign is as much subject, as any of the
meanest of his People."
Thomas
Hobbs, LEVIATHAN, Part II, Chapter 30.
"Except for the few
that legal services lawyers can represent, poor people have access to American
courts in the same sense that the Christians had access to the lions when
they were dragged, unarmed, into a Roman arena."
Earl Johnson, Jr., quoted in Becker
and Gibberman, On Trial! (1987) page 17
"Equal justice, or anything
approaching that goal, requires that poor people be afforded advocates
possessing both the right and the capacity to raise the same fundamental
issues about the allocation of income, opportunity, rights and power as
those with funds have done since the beginning of the Republic." Earl
Johnson, Jr.
JUSTICE AND REFORM (1974) page 279
"At some point, Americans will look back and ask how concepts like
'due process,' 'equal protection of the law' and 'equal justice under law'
were anything but hollow phrases, while our society still tolerated the
denial of counsel to low-income civil litigants." Earl
Johnson, Jr. Beyond
Payne: The Case for a Legally Enforceable Right to Representation in Civil
Cases for Indigent California Litigants 11
Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 240, 250 (1978)
"All crimes are safe but hated
poverty. This, only this, the rigid law pursues." Samuel
Johnson "London", 1738
"Ye shall have one manner of law,
as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country." Leviticus
24:22
"These are the
bounds...put...to the legislative power of every commonwealth ....[T]hey
are to govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in
particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favorite
at court and the countryman at plough."
John Locke
THE SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT, Chaper XV, Paragraph 171
"If
the affluent flagrantly
disregard the law, the poor and the deprived will follow their
leadership."
Robert M. Morgenthau New
York Times, June 26, 1969
"The law for the rich and poor is
not the same." Plautus Cistellaria,
c. 200 B.C.
"There is no
debt with so much prejudice put off as that of justice."
Plutarch
"Lawyers are operators of toll
bridges across which anyone in search of justice must pass." Jane
Bryant Quinn Newsweek, October 9,
1978
"Differences in the ability of
classes to use the machinery of the law, if permitted to remain, lead
inevitably to disparity between the rights of classes....And when the law
recognizes and enforces a distinction between classes, revolution ensues
or democracy is at an end."
Reginald Heber Smith, JUSTICE AND THE POOR (1919)
page 12
"We can end the existing denial of
justice to the poor if we can secure an administration of justice which
shall be accessible to every person no matter how humble."
Reginald Heber Smith, JUSTICE AND
THE POOR (1919) page 257
"In cases wherein new important
points of law and matters of general legal or social interests are
involved, it is essential that legal aid organizations should be able to
carry the issue through to the highest court for its decision.
"Just
as the legal aid organizations are necessary to secure to the individual
poor person his day in court, so they are necessary to secure his hearing
on appeal. But the latter is more than a question of individual
justice; on it may depend the right to protection and redress of countless
other persons similarly situated." Reginald
Heber Smith, JUSTICE AND THE POOR (1919) pages 206-207
"It early became apparent,...that
if legal aid societies were to be effective in their fight against
injustice, they must...take a part in the formulation of remedial
legislation. They saw cases of injustice which the law was powerless
to redress because of the inadequacy of certain provisions or the lack or
proper laws framed to meet the changed conditions."
Reginald Heber Smith
JUSTICE AND
THE POOR (1919)
"Substantive and procedural law
benefits and protects landlords over tenants, creditors over debtors,
lenders over borrowers, and the poor are seldom among the favored
parties." John N. Turner, Attorney
General of Canada Speech to Canadian
Bar Association, December 7, 1969
"What does it profit a poor and
ignorant man that he is equal to his strong antagonist before the law if
there is no one to inform him what the law is? Or that the courts
are open to him on the same terms as all other persons when he has not the
wherewithal to pay the admission fee?" Yale
Professor WIlliam Vance, "The Historical Background of the Legal Aid
Movement," THE ANNALS (March 1926)
"All men have equal rights to
liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws." Voltaire Essay
on Manners, 1756
"Always look to the future as
it holds more than the past. Always look to the past as it will improve the
future."
Jonathan Zimmerman, Historian
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HISTORICAL
DOCUMENTS AND PUBLIC BUILDINGS
"To no one will we sell, to no one
will we refuse or delay, right or justice."
Magna Carta, Cap. 40, 1215
"EQUALITY BEFORE THE
LAW"
The State Motto of Nebraska
"EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW"
Motto inscribed over the entrance to the
United States Supreme Court building
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Last updated March 10, 2001
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