Justice & Law Quote by William Kunstler

New York has always run on a kind of social friction, and Kunstler turns that into a punchline with teeth. The line is funny because it’s legally literal and morally evasive at the same time: “no law” is the thinnest possible defense, the kind you offer when you know you’ve already lost the argument for good behavior. Coming from Kunstler, a movement lawyer who built his reputation challenging the state’s idea of order, it reads as both a shrug and a provocation. If you can’t criminalize dissent, you also can’t criminalize irritation. That’s the point.

The specific intent is to redraw the boundary between public comfort and public freedom. “Annoying” becomes a stand-in for all the messy expressions that polite society would love to regulate out of existence: protests that block traffic, loud speech, abrasive personalities, the whole theater of urban life where people constantly collide. The subtext is a warning: once you start treating annoyance as an offense, you’ve basically handed authorities a pretext to police whatever they find inconvenient.

Context matters. Kunstler’s career unfolded amid the civil rights era, antiwar protests, and high-profile trials where “keeping the peace” often meant suppressing unpopular voices. New York, famously crowded and overstimulated, is the perfect setting: a city whose tolerance is less about kindness than about necessity. The line celebrates that uneasy bargain. You’re allowed to be difficult here, not because anyone likes it, but because the alternative is letting power decide which kinds of discomfort are illegal.