Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet

Quotes

• “When a man is asked if he is an esquire, and he answers that he is an esquire, the general understanding is that he is a person of no profession or occupation.”
• “Personal injury is a more serious matter than damage to property.”
• “I readily admit that the law which requires presumption or custom to be carried back for a period of nearly 700 years, is a bad and mischievous law, and one which is discreditable to us as a civilised and enlightened people, but such is the law; and while it so continues, I consider myself, in administering it, as bound to administer it as I find it; nor do I feel myself warranted in undermining or frittering it away by subtle fictions or artificial presumptions inconsistent with truth and fact.”
• “I think the old, sound, and honest maxim that "you shall not do evil that good may come," is applicable in law as well as in morals.”
• “Whatever disadvantages attach to a system of unwritten law, and of these we are fully sensible, it has at least this advantage, that its elasticity enables those who administer it to adapt it to the varying conditions of society, and to the requirements and habits of the age in which we live, so as to avoid the inconsistencies and injustice which arise when the law is no longer in harmony with the wants and usages and interests of the generation to which it is immediately applied.”
• “Writers on international law . . . cannot make the law … it must have received the assent of the nations who are to be bound by it. This assent may be express … or may be implied from established usage.”

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