Gad Saad on the Derek Chauvin verdict

Here you have one year of violent rioting susequent to the horrifying and tragic killing of George Floyd and you have countless mobs saying, "if the correct verdict is not reached, cities will burn." So do you think, on a scale of zero to 100, where 100 they were maximally intimidated, zero they weren't at all, what's the number that you're going to ascribe to how afraid those poor jury members were when they were deliberating? Certainly no intellectually honest decent human being would say it's at zero. We can debate if it's at 100 or 95 or 90 or 80, but is this the type of society you want to live in?

~ Gad Saad, "My Thoughts on the Derek Chauvin Verdict," YouTube, 6:55 mark

Walter Williams compares a Supreme Court justice to a referee

A referee’s job, whether he is a football referee, baseball umpire or a Supreme Court justice, is to know the rules of the game and to ensure that those rules are evenly applied without bias. Do we want a referee or justice to allow empathy to influence their decisions? Let us answer this question using this year’s Super Bowl as an example. 

The San Francisco 49ers have played in seven Super Bowls in their franchise history, winning five times. On the other hand, coming into the 2020 game, the Kansas City Chiefs had not won a Super Bowl title in 50 years. In anyone’s book, this is a gross disparity. Should the referees have the empathy to understand what it is like to be a perennial loser, not winning a Super Bowl in five decades? What would you think of a referee whose play calls were guided by empathy or pity? Suppose a referee, in the name of compensatory justice, stringently applied pass interference or roughing the passer violations against the San Francisco 49ers and less stringently against the Chiefs. Would you support a referee who refused to make offensive pass interference calls because he thought it was a silly rule? You would probably remind him that it is the league that makes the rules (football law), not referees. 

Supreme Court justices should be umpires or referees, enforcing neutral rules.

~ Walter Williams, "Supreme Court and Rules of the Game," LewRockwell.com, October 1, 2020

Edmund Burke on the preconditions of liberty

Men are qualified for civil liberties, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.

~ Edmund Burke

(From Chapter 2 of Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes on the legal system

This is a court of law, not a court of justice.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Butler Shaffer on justice and 9/11

One of the emptiest words in our culture is "justice." Its vacuous quality is what makes it so popular: it requires little in the way of focused, intelligent explication to employ it. To those on the political "left," justice" gets translated into a demand for money to be taken from some and bestowed upon others. Those on the political "right" use it as a plea for the building of more prisons and the hiring of more police officers to ferret out more persons to fill them. When people tell me "I demand justice," my response is to warn them to temper their insistence, as they might just get it!

When pressed for a definition, I reply that justice is the redistribution of violence. In its simplest form, X commits a wrong upon Y, for which Y demands retaliation against X. In its more complex form in our collectivized world, fifteen Saudis, two men from the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese join in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings. As these men were killed in the process, the demands for "justice" led most Americans to accept the bombing and killing of innocent men, women, and children in such unrelated places as Afghanistan and Iraq! Justice and rationality have little to do with one another.

~ Butler Shaffer, "What Is Justice?," LewRockwell.com, July 13, 2009

Cicero on moderation and extremism

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

~ Cicero

Plato on justice

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

~ Plato (428 BC-348 BC)

Churchill on arbitrary arrest and imprisonment

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

~ Sir Winston Churchill