Great Throughts Treasury

"When we say that law ‘embodies’ values we are talking metaphorically. What does it mean? Values are only ‘embodied’ in law in the sense that and to the extent that human beings approve of the laws they have because of the state of affairs they are supposed to secure, being states of affairs which are on some ground deemed just or otherwise good. This need not be articulated at all."

"I believe in law... Simply: there is such a thing as law, and where it exists it tends to improve the lives of those who live by it. Law exists, and has prima facie positive value. "

"State Courts have no right to assume an absolute superiority of state constitution over international good order, including the European dimensions of that good order. This is not the same as saying that they must simply defer to whatever the ECJ considers to be mandated by the European constitution. For its reading of that constitution and the state Court’s reading of its own constitution ought both to have regard to the international obligations which still subsist notwithstanding, or indeed because of, the fact that Community law is a ‘new legal order sui generis’."

"Can we think of a world in which our normative existence and our practical life are anchored in, or related to, a variety of institutional systems, each of which has validity or operation in relation to some range of concerns, none of which is absolute over all the others, and all of which, for most purposes, can operate without serious mutual conflict in areas of overlap? If this is possible practically as it clearly is conceptually, it would involve a diffusion of political power centres as well as of legal authorities. It would depend on a high degree of relatively willing co-operation and a relatively low degree of coercion in its direct and naked forms. It would create space for a real and serious debate about the demands of subsidiarity. "