Boston Legal Quotes

Ranger is one of the few civilians in Trenton with a permit to carry concealed. He owns office buildings in Boston, has a daughter in Florida by a failed marriage, has worked worldwide as a mercenary, and has a moral code that isn’t entirely in sync with our legal system. I have no idea who the heck he is . . . but I like him.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF ALL LEGAL IMMIGRANTS—TWO-THIRDS—GET IN ON “family reunification” policies each year. In other words, America has no say about the single largest category of immigrants and we end up with gems like Octomom, the Boston Marathon bombers, and one hundred thousand Somalis in Minnesota. Entire villages from Pakistan are dumped on the country, based not on their expertise in nuclear engineering, but because everyone in the village is related to the first guy who got in. If they’re not, in the strict sense, related, they’ll lie. In

As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of Newsweek, and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o’clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church’s scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope. A poll done for the Washington Post, ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention. Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church’s negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers. By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.

a closer walk with God than any man he had known. Davenport went from place to place without invitation, and depending upon impulses and impressions, denounced as unconverted such ministers as disagreed with him and exhorted their flocks to desert them and follow him. Confusion and bitterness resulted in almost every parish which he visited. Congregations were divided, alienation and strife were created, the evil effects of which continued for many years.  In order to suppress these evils the Connecticut legislature in 1742 passed an act forbidding any minister or licentiate to preach in any church not his own, without the consent of its pastor and the major portion of its membership, under penalty of forfeiting the right to collect his legal salary, if a resident of the colony, and liability to expulsion from the colony if not. Davenport was accordingly arrested and brought before the assembly, by whom he was adjudged insane and sent to his parish on Long Island. Not long afterwards he appeared in Boston, where in accordance with his custom he denounced the ministers as "unconverted" and "leading their people blindfold to hell." He was arrested for uttering slanderous statements

Denny: It's fun being me. Is it fun being you? Alan: Most of the time actually. Denny: Then what else is there? Alan: Indeed.

To say that a government that serves the people is allowed to disarm the people is a simple contradiction in terms and a legal impossibility. — Donald M. Smith

What cheek!" Lady Brookhampton declared, staring at Juliet in offended shock. "Yes. We colonials speak our minds." "Perhaps, then, I too should speak my mind," Katharine said, with a superior little smile as she nodded toward Charlotte. "Why, look at you, married less than a week and already toting his brat. I dare say, Lord Gareth works fast, does he not, Mama?" "Juliet is not the first woman Lord Gareth has ruined. But she just said she doesn't want to hear anything bad about her husband, Katharine." Juliet smiled sweetly. "Oh, but Lord Gareth wasn't the one who ruined me."  Both women looked at her. "Charles was." "What?!"  The word shot from Lady Brookhampton's mouth like a ball from a musket; beside her, her daughter's jaw nearly fell off its hinges. Juliet said, "You know, Charles? The one you all think was so perfect?"  Good Lord, would you listen to me, defending Gareth over Charles!  "He and I met in Boston in the winter of '74. We were engaged to be married, but he died in the fighting near Concord last year, and the legal union was never made. I came to England seeking the Duke of Blackheath's help, as Charles had bid me to do should anything happen to him."  Juliet's steady, dark green gaze never wavered as she faced down her husband's detractors. "Lord Gareth is an honorable and selfless man. He married me so that his brother's baby would bear the de Montforte name. I think that is most noble of him. Don't you?" Lady Brookhampton's jaw was working up and down as she fought to find words. "Well, I ... well, yes, I suppose it is." Her daughter's face had gone a very unattractive red. "You mean to say you were engaged to ... to my Charles?" "Was he your Charles?"  Juliet smiled sweetly and got to her feet. "I'm sorry. He didn't mention it. I thought he was mine. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have things to do. Good day."   ~~~~

Expressive association In the United States, expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment – speech, assembly, press, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group's expression. However, in the subsequent decisions of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group's ability to advocate a particular point of view. The government cannot, through the use of anti-discrimination laws, force groups to include a message that they do not wish to convey. However, this concept does not now apply in the University setting due to the Supreme Court's ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld Hastings College of Law policy that the school's conditions on recognizing student groups were viewpoint neutral and reasonable. The policy requires student organizations to allow "any student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions, regardless of their status or beliefs" and so, can be used to deny the group recognition as an official student organization because it had required its members to attest in writing that "I believe in: The Bible as the inspired word of God; The Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God's son; The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins; His bodily resurrection and His personal return; The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration; [and] Jesus Christ, God's son, is Lord of my life." The Court reasoned that because this constitutional inquiry occurs in the education context the same considerations that have led the Court to apply a less restrictive level of scrutiny to speech in limited public forums applies. Thus, the college's all-comers policy is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student organization forum.

these criminals, charged with murder, are not yet legally proved guilty, and therefore, however criminal, are entitled, by the laws of God and man, to all legal counsel and aid; that my duty as a man obliged me to undertake; that my duty as a lawyer strengthened the obligation;

I need to sue. I need to make money for this firm. For that I need a victim... You need to blame somebody. this is America.

Zinn chose not to include such information, but instead limited his discussion to earlier centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. He does admit that slaves were captured “in the interior” of Africa—frequently by blacks. Yet the African slave traders are absolved of responsibility. They were “caught up in the [Atlantic] slave trade themselves.”32 And yet, Bernard Lewis quotes a ninth century writer who observed that “the black kings sell blacks without pretext and without war.”33 Far from being hapless victims lured into a new kind of commerce, the Africans’ legal system actually “fueled the Atlantic slave trade,” according to Boston University professor John Kelly Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680, published by Cambridge University Press.34 And while slaves in America and Europe “typically had difficult, demanding, and degrading work, and they were often mistreated by exploitative masters who were anxious to maximize profits,” in Africa a slave could be arbitrarily sacrificed on an altar.35

What actually happened was this. Over the last twenty years, we have delighted in our children, and have had many of them. We don’t shuttle them off to day care or leave them with professional care providers. And we homeschool them or have them in schools which encourage direct parental involvement. Our families are tight. We have had many children because we love them, despite hostile stares or comments from those outside our community. To quote a comment made to my wife on the street years ago, “My, you don’t believe in the pill, do you?” But we didn’t mind—kids are a kick. And, as I can now say, grandkids are a kick. It just keeps getting better. But then one day, we were distracted from our work by all this yelling that was coming from the general direction of the Moscow School District. “Where have the kids gone!? How could this have happened? Maybe they moved out of the state!” And the powers that be put lighter fluid in their hair, set it ablaze, and ran in tight little circles. “Where are the kids?” You see the state takes away money for each little breathing bipedal carbon unit that doesn’t show up in the classroom each autumn, and it turns out this is serious business. So, against my better judgment, I say something like this: “Um—maybe you don’t have kids in your schools because you quit having them. And if any actually make it into the womb, you think it should be legal to get them out of there violently. Talk about eviction. And if any of successfully run that gauntlet and actually show up, you provide them with a fifth-rate education and then turn them loose into your hollow and ugly world. And maybe you don’t have access to our kids anymore because we looked at all this and quit handing them to you to educate. Just a thought.” Take care not to get the whole thing turned around. Susan’s sign-off—“breeding my way to a better tomorrow” reminds me of a joke that can be reapplied to our situation. Early in the twentieth century, a refined woman from Boston was at a high brow social gathering where she met a woman from Chicago, who didn’t quite fit with the refined lady’s ideas of deportment. “Here in Boston,” the great lady said with a sniff, “we think breeding is everything.” “Well,” the other lady said, “out in Chicago we think it is a lot of fun, but we don’t think it’s everything.

There are no facts anymore, kiddo. only good or bad fiction.

Ebenezer Fox returned to Boston in May of 1783, only twenty years old but a seasoned adventurer. During his time at sea he had survived several battles, endured the hatch of the Jersey, and escaped from both the British and the French. His life had been endangered on numerous occasions, he had been wounded in the encounter on Jamaica, and he had lost part of his hearing. At the end of it all he received $80, his share of the Flora’s plunder. By prior agreement his master was to receive half of this, but upon Ebenezer’s return Mr. Bosson demanded it all. Legally, that was his right. Despite more than three years of harrowing escapades and service to his country, young Ebenezer Fox was still apprenticed until his twenty-first birthday to a Boston barber who never went to war.

I had several friends from law school who were very enterprising guys, much more so than the average law student. They each started businesses after practicing law at large firms for multiple years. What kind of businesses did they start? They started boutique law firms. This is completely unsurprising if you think about it. They’d spent years becoming good at delivering legal services. It was a field that they understood and could compete in. Their credentials translated too. People learn from what they’re doing and do it again on their own. It’s not just lawyers; the consulting firm Bain and Company was started by seven former partners and managers from the Boston Consulting Group. Myriad boutique investment banks and hedge funds have spun out of large financial organizations. You can see the same pattern in the startup world. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, its founders and employees went on to found or cofound LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), YouTube (Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley), Yelp (Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman), Tesla Motors (Elon Musk), SpaceX (Musk again), Yammer (David Sacks), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), and many other companies. PayPal’s CEO, Peter Thiel, famously made a $500,000 investment in Facebook that grew to over $1 billion. In this sense, PayPal is one of the most prolific companies of recent times. But if you look at any successful growth company you’ll start to see their alumni show up doing parallel things. Former Apple employees founded or cofounded Android, Palm, Nest, and Handspring, companies that revolve around devices. Former Yahoo! employees founded Ycombinator, Cloudera, Hunch.com, AppNexus, Polyvore, and many other web-oriented companies. Organizations give rise to other organizations like themselves.

This same distortion appears when the gospel is preached to the natural man. Boston was all too familiar with the instinct of the awakened individual to say, “I will now try much harder, and I will do better.” It seems logical: I realize I have failed. I must reverse this failure by doing better. But it is serpentine logic, for it simply compounds the old legal spirit.

Cotton Mather was born Feb. 12, 1663 in Boston, Massachusetts where he would spend all of his life until his death on Feb. 13, 1728. The son of the well-known preacher and academic Increase Mather, Cotton exhibited unusual intellectual gifts. At 12 he entered Harvard, receiving his MA at the age of 18 from the hands of his father, who was president of the college at the time. He preached his first sermon in his father’s church in August 1680 and was formally ordained in 1685 becoming his father’s colleague. While believing in witchcraft, he sided with Samuel Willard on trying to bar the legality of spectral evidence.

The antinomian principle, that it is needless for a man perfectly justified by faith to endeavor to keep the law and do good works, is a glaring evidence that legality is so ingrained in man's corrupt nature that until a man truly come to Christ by faith, the legal disposition will still be reigning in him. Let him turn himself into what shape or be of what principles he will in religion though he run into antinomianism; he will carry along with him his legal spirit which will always be a slavish and unholy spirit.

He required a specific place to land in London, September 1601, during the week before the investor, Sir Edward Greylock, agreed to put his money into the Boston Council for Boston. This was an event we were able to date with precision from legal records.

You really want to know?” Beatrice nodded. Catherine simply waited. If he wanted to tell them, he would. Clarence was not the sort of man you could persuade or plead with. “All right. It was the year I graduated from law school. Like the other black men in my class, I was inspired by Judge Ruffin, the first black man to graduate from Harvard Law and the first to become a judge in Massachusetts. I thought I was going to be just like him. Me, a poor boy raised by a widowed mother who used to clean other people’s houses to pay the rent. Well, I went through Howard on scholarship, then Harvard on scholarship, and my first year out I worked for an organization offering legal aid to other poor folk—black, Irish, Italian, all sorts. I was sent to one of the counties in the western part of the state, to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman. That was the first time a judge called me ‘boy.’ I got my client off all right—the woman herself stood in the witness stand to say it wasn’t rape. They wanted to get married. That was legal in Massachusetts, and she was of age, but her father didn’t want her to marry a black man, so he told the sheriff that my client had raped her. She was visibly pregnant. “My client walked out of that courthouse a free man, but there was a crowd waiting for him outside, and suddenly her brother stepped out of that crowd. He was the sheriff’s deputy. He had a gun, and he said he was going to shoot that damn . . . his language isn’t fit to repeat. He was determined to kill my client. Without thinking, I jumped on him and wrestled with him for the gun. It went off. . . . He bled to death in my arms. So I was tried for manslaughter in that courthouse, in front of that judge. Despite his jury instructions, I was acquitted—you could almost see him frothing at the mouth with fury and tearing his hair out, the day I walked out of that courtroom, a free man. Everyone in that crowd had seen it was an accident, but who was going to give me a job after that? It didn’t matter that I was innocent. My face had been on the cover of the Boston Globe as the black man who’d killed a white policeman.

No imputation on his purpose but cleared away like the cloud from a breath on spotless steel, leaving the metal bright as before. He was as incorruptible as he honorably said to me was Fessenden, his great rival in the Senate; and when he also one day, speaking of his limited means, remarked: "I have never had the art to get my hands into the Treasury," I was fain to answer, "You the whole man are in the Treasury yourself." He was indeed in our politics a fund and never-broken bank of moral wealth. Justice was his inspiration. He was a prophet by equity. Righteousness was his genius; and humanity, in any lack of imagination, his insight and foresight. He was without spot. He wore ermine though he sat not on the bench. John Jay had not cleaner hands, nor John Marshall a more honest will; Hamilton and Jefferson were no more patriotic in contending than he in every legal or congressional strife; and Story, his favorite teacher, and whose favorite pupil he was, no more opulent in knowledge or innocent in its use.