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Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 395 of Will Durant’s 1944 volume, Caesar and Christ [2]:

Law tends to lag behind moral development, not because law cannot learn, but because experience has shown the wisdom of testing new ways in practice before congealing them into law.

DBx: Durant here wrote, not of legislation, but of genuine law – that is, of law that emerges through practice and experience, is embodied in custom, and comes to be discovered, articulated, and enforced by courts. One of the many problems with legislation, as distinct from law, is that legislation is often rushed – it is often enacted in reaction to current events – without the legislators having sufficiently considered the likely full consequences of their consciously created edicts.

Legislators typically underestimate the complexity of the social systems into which they thrust their edicts.

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