Hard cases make bad law

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Hard_cases_make_bad_law an entity of type: Abstraction100002137

Hard cases make bad law is an adage or legal maxim meaning that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. In other words, a general law is better drafted for the average circumstance as this will be more common. The original meaning of the phrase concerned cases in which the law had a hard impact on some person whose situation aroused sympathy. rdf:langString
rdf:langString Hard cases make bad law
xsd:integer 25879099
xsd:integer 1115398726
rdf:langString Hard cases make bad law is an adage or legal maxim meaning that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. In other words, a general law is better drafted for the average circumstance as this will be more common. The original meaning of the phrase concerned cases in which the law had a hard impact on some person whose situation aroused sympathy. The expression dates at least to 1837. It was used in 1904 by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Its validity has since been questioned and dissenting variations include the phrase "Bad law makes hard cases", and even its opposite, "Hard cases make good law".
xsd:nonNegativeInteger 7750

data from the linked data cloud