They are all necessarily either the impudent, fraudulent, and criminal usurpations of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, or the senseless work of ignorant or thoughtless men, who do not know, or certainly do not realize, what they are doing.
Lysander Spooner
The Public Record
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
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In whatever light, therefore, they are viewed, they are utterly destitute of everything like authority or obligation.
If they forbid any man to do anything, which justice would permit him to do, they are criminal invasions of his natural and rightful liberty.
If they command any man to do anything which justice does not require him to do, they are simple, naked usurpations and tyrannies.
If they command or license any man to do injustice, they are criminal on their face.
They are therefore mere idle wind, such as would be commands to consider the day as day, and the night as night.
If they command men to do justice, they add nothing to men's obligation to do it, or to any man's right to enforce it.
And nobody is bound to take the least notice of them, unless it be to trample them under foot, as usurpations.
There is consequently nothing binding or obligatory about them.
It is a falsehood to call them laws; for there is nothing in them that either creates men's duties or rights, or enlightens them as to their duties or rights.
Therefore all their laws, as they call them,--that is, all the laws of their own making,--have no color of authority or obligation.
Lawmakers, as they call themselves, can add nothing to it, nor take anything from it.