Tag Archives: law

Steven Pinker

The logic of the Leviathan can be summed up in a triangle. In every act of violence, there are three interested parties: the aggressor, the victim, and a bystander. Each has a motive for violence: the aggressor to prey upon the victim, the victim to retaliate, the bystander to minimize collateral damage from their fight. Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, New York, 2011, p. 35

Enrique Marí

Como no he encontrado en el ejercicio de mi profesión razonamientos lógicos ni menos aún verificaciones empíricas del Derecho, me hallo en tren—bajo sugerencia de Hume—de arrojar sin conmiseración mi diploma a la hoguera, por no contener otra cosa que sofística e ilusión.

Enrique Marí, ‘¿Computadoras jurídicas o jibarismo social?, Nueva Ciencia, mayo, 1973

Jeremy Bentham

It is wonderful how forward some have been to look upon it as a kind of presumption and ingratitude, and rebellion, and cruelty, and I know not what besides, not to allege only, nor to own, but to suffer any one so much as to imagine, than an old-established law could in any respect be a fit object of condemnation. Whether it has been a kind of personification that has been the cause of this, as if the Law were a living creature, or whether it has been the mechanical veneration of antiquity, or what other delusion of the fancy, I shall not here enquire. For my part, I know not for what good reason it is that the merit of justifying a law when right should have been thought greater, than that of censuring it when wrong.

Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, London, 1776, preface