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The concept of law can be defined only as the reality tending toward the idea of law.

— Gustav Radbruch Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

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More quotes by Gustav Radbruch

Philosophy is not to relieve one of decisions, but to confront him with decisions. It is to make life not easy but, on the contrary, problematical.

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

Of course it is true that the public benefit, along with justice, is an objective of the law. And of course laws have value in and of themselves, even bad laws: the value, namely, of securing the law against uncertainty.

Five Minutes of Legal Philosophy (1945)

As it is the essence of justice ultimately to shape those relations in the sense of equality, so it is essential to the legal precept in its meaning to be directed toward equality, to claim to be susceptible of generalization or to be general in character.

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

It is the professional duty of the judge to validate the law’s claim to validity, to sacrifice his own sense of the right to the authoritative command of the law, to ask only what is legal and ask not if it is also just.

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

Concepts such as legal subject and legal object, legal relation and legal wrong, and indeed the very concept of law itself, are not accidental possessions of several or all legal orders but are necessary prerequisites if any legal order is to be understood as legal.

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gustav Radbruch (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.