Jonathan Sumption > Quotes

“He rose late. He was recklessly extravagant and a notorious womaniser. The King was never a cipher. But well before his world was clouded by illness and insanity his capacity for public business was limited. He was idle, slow-witted and easily bored.”
― Jonathan Sumption, Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War, Volume 3

“There are black-letter lawyers and lawyers who bring a greater measure of inventiveness to their task. There are activist lawyers and those who believe that the law should impose as little as possible on human affairs. There are instinctive believers in legal solutions and instinctive sceptics. The intensely deliberative nature of judicial decision-making, at any rate at the appellate level, usually irons out the grosser personal idiosyncracies. However, most of the problems with which lawyers have to deal are not about law at all. They are about fact and evidence. Lawyers are formed by experience to analyse complex factual issues in which they have no pre-existing expertise, often concerned with arcane scientific, economic or statistical concepts. It is a valuable discipline.”
― Jonathan Sumption, Law in a Time of Crisis

“Majority rule is the basic principle of democracy. But that only means that a majority is enough to authorise the state’s acts. It is not enough to make them legitimate. This is because majority rule is no more than a rule of decision. It does nothing to accommodate our differences. It just restates them in numerical terms. Democracies cannot operate on the basis that a bare majority takes 100 per cent of the political spoils. If it did, it would harbour large and permanently disaffected groups in their midst, who had no common bonds to transcend their differences with the majority.”
― Jonathan Sumption, Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics

“Use cunning and deception as weapons, for in the circumstances deceit is no more than prudence,’ Innocent advised his legates.”
― Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade