Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on January 8, 2018
… is from page 22 of Garrett Barden’s and Tim Murphy’s 2010 book, Law and Justice in Community (original emphasis):
[W]hen humans live together they are brought up to do a whole host of things in particular ways. These ways of doing things include, for example, customs, practices, well-known and accepted procedures and mutual expectations that establish the jural relationships particular to any community. These are ways of doing things that are ‘extra-legal’ in the sense only that they do not originate in state or positive law, that is, in constitutions, statutes, codes, or case law. They are ‘legal’, however, in that they constitute the living law of a community, which does not come into existence by any process of public and explicit formal consideration or debate. The communal living law – or the communal moral law – is not for the most part explicitly formulated in language; no individual or institution can change it; and when it changes it tends to be a relatively slow process of change.
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