Law

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

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.

, Home - La Nueva Ciencia, 1973

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, The collected works of Jeremy Bentham: A comment on the commentaries and A fragment on goverment, Oxford, 1977

Se puede observar que se ha incurrido en lo que algunos llaman “el angelismo racionalista”, por el cual se tiene la convicción de que el poder de las normas es suficiente para revertir conductas sociales.

Daniel Alberto Sabsay and José Miguel Onaindia, La constitución de los argentinos: análisis y comentario de su texto luego de la reforma de 1994: incluye comentarios a las leyes 24430 y 24444 y al decreto 977/95 y jurispurdencia posterior a la reforma, Buenos Aires, 1994, p. 130