But legislators ought to do what lawyers cannot; for they have no other rules to bind them but the great principles of reason and equity and the general sense of mankind.
Edmund Burke: “But legislators ought to do what lawyers cannot; for they have no other rules to bind them but the great principles of…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke asserts that legislators must operate beyond strict legal rules, guided instead by fundamental principles of justice and equity.
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Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and as it were by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness?
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.





