In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.
Interpretation
The state holds the power over life and death in effective legal systems, while weak legal structures can empower mob justice.
In this quote, Teju Cole emphasizes the critical role of a functioning legal system in society. He argues that in countries where the courts are strong and law enforcement is effective, the state retains the authority to administer justice, including capital punishment. However, in societies plagued by weak legal systems and systemic injustices, the absence of reliable law enforcement can lead to a breakdown of order, where mobs may resort to violence and punishment outside the bounds of the law.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of legal reform in developing countries.
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
Justice, not expedience, must be the guiding light. The orator must fix his eye on the polestar of justice, and plough straight thither. The moment he glances toward expediency, he falls from his high estate.
Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and may be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.
A judge can't have any preferred outcome in any particular case. The judge's only obligation - and it's a solemn obligation - is to the rule of law.
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.
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