The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.
Interpretation
The integrity and fairness of the law is being evaluated alongside the specific case at hand.
This quote emphasizes that the legal system's principles, fairness, and execution are under scrutiny just as much as the specific issue being adjudicated. When a case is brought to trial, it not only assesses the validity of the arguments presented but also reflects the broader justice system's reliability and ethics.
In practice
In a discussion about legal reforms, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of accountability in the justice system.
If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
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