If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge ena… - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. The practice of it, in spite of popular jests, tends to make good citizens and good men.

Leaving the criminal law on one side, what is the difference between the liability under the mill acts or statutes authorizing a taking by eminent domain and the liability for what we call a wrongful conversion of property where restoration is out of the question. In both cases the party taking another man's property has to pay its fair value as assessed by a jury, and no more. What significance is there in calling one taking right and another wrong from the point of view of the law?

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.