"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. . . . And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times and there will be one master and ruler, that is God, over us all, for he is author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge."

-Cicero (106-43 BCE), De Republica
Quoted in Edgar Bodenheimer. Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. p. 14.

"Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and the injust."

-The Institutes, The Justinian Code (529)
Justinian Code, "The Institutes: Book I, Section I," Medieval Legal History Sourcebook,
<http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/535institutes.html>

 

"The Confucian Code of Rites (Liji) is expected to be the controlling document on civilized behavior, not law. In the Confucian world view, rule of law is applied only to those who have fallen beyond the bounds of civilized behavior. Civilized people are expected to observe proper rites. Only social outcasts are expected to have their actions controlled by law. Thus the rule of law s considered a state of barbaric primitiveness, prior to achieving the civilized state of voluntary observation of proper rites. What is legal is not necessarily moral or just."

-Henry C K Liu, "The Abduction of Modernity: Part 3 Rule of Law vs Confucianism," 2003
Asia Times Online, www.atimes.com.

 

"[Kant's conception of law] seems to be the final form of an ideal of social order which governed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century: an ideal of the maximum of individual self-assertion as the end for which the legal order exists."

-Roscoe Pound on Immanuel Kant's legal philsophy
Quoted in Edgar Bodenheimer. Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. p. 63.

 

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
. . . .
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.
. . . .
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge."

-Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Excerpted from reprint in A Documentary History of Human Rights,
Ed. Jon E. Lewis. New York: Carroll &Graff Publishers, 2003. Pp. 453-4.