Walter Lippmann on what gives our laws reality

    Never have we read anything by Walter Lippmann that wasn’t profound and clearly put. Test our view here:
   
    The amount of law is relatively small which a modern legislature can successfully impose. The reason for this is that unless the enforcement of the law is taken in hand by the citizenry, the officials as such are quite helpless. It is possible to enforce the law of contracts, because the injured party will sue; it is possible to enforce the law against burglary, because most everybody will report a burglary to the police. But it is not possible to enforce the old-fashioned speed laws on the highways because the police are too few and far between, the pedestrians are uninterested, and motorists like to speed. There is here a very fundamental principle of modern lawmaking: insofar as a law depends on the initiative of officials in detecting violations and in prosecuting, that law will almost certainly be difficult to enforce. If a considerable part of the population is hostile to the law, and if the majority has only a platonic belief in it, the law will surely break down. For what gives law reality is not that it is commanded by the sovereign but that it brings the organized force of the state to the aid of those citizens who believe in the law.   

    (Quoted from page 276 of A Preface to Morals, by Walter Lippmann. The Macmillan Company, 1929.)
    For a brief biography of Walter Lippmann, click here. For images of or relating to Walter Lippmann, click here.