Justice & Law Quote by Edward Levi

Law, in Edward Levi's telling, is less a marble monument than a tool that gets handled by whatever hands history provides. Calling it an "instrument for practical action" strips away the romantic idea that statutes and precedents are pure reason. They are built to do things: allocate power, settle conflict, legitimate force. That practicality makes law "responsive to the wisdom of its time" - a phrase that lands with a dry warning, because Levi immediately adds that this wisdom "may be wrong". The line diagnoses a basic democratic hazard: the system must be porous enough to absorb changing social judgments, yet sturdy enough not to become a mood ring for public passion.

The subtext is institutional humility paired with institutional pride. Levi admits law is not outside culture; it is a cultural artifact that can be captured by bad consensus, fear, or fashionable certainty. But he insists it also "carries forward...a memory of received values". That "memory" is doing heavy work. It's not nostalgia; it's continuity, a slow-moving archive of principles - due process, fairness, restraints on arbitrariness - that can outlast a moral panic or a political crusade.

Written by a public servant and legal thinker shaped by mid-century governance, the sentence reads as a defense of precedent and procedure after an era that had seen both technocratic confidence and catastrophic mass passions. Levi frames law as a kind of time-traveling institution: it adapts, yes, but it also remembers, sometimes disobeying the present on behalf of lessons the present would rather forget.