Justice & Law Quote by E. Y. Harburg

“There ought to be a law against necessity” is a joke with a bruise under it. E. Y. Harburg made his living writing songs that sound light on their feet while carrying real economic weight, and this line has that same trick: it stages a mock-political demand against something that can’t be legislated away. Necessity isn’t a villain you can indict; it’s the grindstone itself. That’s why the phrasing lands. It borrows the confident cadence of reform talk (“there ought to be a law”) and points it at the one force that ignores every statute: need.

Harburg came of age in the shadow of the Great Depression, when “necessity” wasn’t an abstract moral concept but the daily fact of eviction notices, empty cupboards, and humiliating compromise. In that context, the line reads like a protest song condensed to a wisecrack. It’s not naivete about policy; it’s a way of exposing how often the law protects property, procedure, and power while leaving hardship to be treated as nature. The subtext is blunt: if society can write rules for markets, contracts, and morality, then pretending poverty is inevitable is a choice, not a weather report.

As a musician and lyricist, Harburg also understands how longing and constraint animate popular art. “Necessity” is the engine of plot and punchline, but also the thing that makes people settle, shrink, or surrender. His line doesn’t just complain; it indicts a culture that romanticizes struggle while refusing to redistribute the conditions that create it. The laugh catches because the wish is impossible, and because it shouldn’t be.