Justice & Law Quote by Jonathan Swift

Legal precedent, in Swift's hands, isn't stability; it's a scam with paperwork. The line skewers a profession that congratulates itself for being rational while quietly laundering cruelty through procedure. Swift's barb lands because it mimics the lawyerly tone of a "maxim" and then flips it: the supposed safeguard of consistency becomes a machine for repeating yesterday's wrongs with tomorrow's signature.

The specific intent is surgical. Swift isn't arguing that rules are bad; he's exposing how rules get weaponized when they detach from "common justice" and "the general reason of mankind". Those phrases are doing heavy moral work: they appeal to an implied human standard that predates statutes. Against it, the lawyers' devotion to record-keeping reads like devotion to impunity. They "take special care" not to preserve wisdom but to archive exceptions, loopholes, and rationalizations - a library of licensed brutality.

The subtext is cynicism about institutions that mistake continuity for legitimacy. "Whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again" describes a circular logic: power commits an injustice, law blesses it after the fact, and then precedent turns that blessing into tradition. The record becomes a shield: don't blame us, blame the file.

Context matters. Swift is writing from a world of imperial administration, class hierarchy, and corrupt patronage, where law often served property and empire more than people. This isn't anti-intellectualism; it's anti-legalism: a warning that systems designed to limit arbitrariness can become, without moral pressure, elegant engines of repetition.