Justice & Law Quote by Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Jarvis opens with a politician’s version of humility, but it’s the strategic kind: a disclaimer that makes room for power. “In the first place” signals sequence and control, the voice of someone laying groundwork before a larger argument lands. He’s not musing; he’s preparing the audience to accept an imperfect outcome as reasonable, maybe even necessary.

The line works because it anticipates criticism and neutralizes it. By conceding that “no human law is perfect,” Jarvis converts flaws from evidence of failure into proof of realism. It’s a neat rhetorical pivot: if imperfection is baked into the category, then a law’s defects don’t automatically disqualify it. The phrase “construction or execution” quietly broadens the shield. If the statute is clumsy, blame the limits of drafting; if enforcement is ugly, blame the limits of administration. Either way, the system stays legitimate.

Context matters because Jarvis operated in the late 19th-century South, when law was not just governance but social architecture. In a period of Reconstruction backlash and the rise of Jim Crow-era legal regimes, “human law” could be invoked to sound modest while defending structures that were anything but. The sentence can function as a calming preface to compromise, but it can also serve as moral insulation: if you accept imperfection as the baseline, you’re less likely to demand justice as the standard.

It’s persuasion by lowered expectations, delivered with the steady cadence of authority.