Justice & Law Quote by Thomas Erskine

Erskine’s sentence doesn’t just praise the legal profession; it grabs it by the lapels and turns it into a constitutional load-bearing wall. The drama is deliberate. “For ever, at all hazards” is the language of siege, suggesting a moment when the English bar is not merely being criticized but threatened - by crown influence, partisan pressure, or fashionable moral crusades. He’s telling you that the real fight isn’t over a single defendant or case. It’s over whether the system can still claim to deliver “impartial justice” at all.

The key move is how he frames lawyers as guardians of a public good rather than hired guns. “Dignity, independence, and integrity” reads like a three-part oath: dignity as social standing (so the bar can’t be bullied), independence as insulation from political command, integrity as internal discipline (so the bar can’t be bought). Together they form a theory of legitimacy: courts don’t earn trust by sounding virtuous; they earn it by being structurally hard to corrupt.

The subtext is a warning to power. Undermine the bar - intimidate advocates, punish unpopular defenses, make professional survival depend on ideological obedience - and you don’t just weaken lawyers. You erase the one mechanism that forces the state to prove its case. “The most valuable part of the English constitution” is pointed, almost taunting: not the monarchy, not Parliament, but the gritty procedural fairness that keeps authority from becoming mere force.