Quotation of the Day…

Tweet

… is from pages 241-242 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:

All crimes are violations of custom, but all violations of custom are not necessarily crimes. There are many departures from custom of which the law takes no notice, or should take no notice, but which it should leave to the jurisdiction of the moral forces of society. The line of division between those offences which are properly punishable by law and those the repression of which is wisely left to moral forces is the line of probable violence.