All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer.

No outward doors of a man’s house can in general be broken open to execute any civil process; though in criminal cases the public safety supersedes the private.

The royal navy of England hath ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength, – the floating bulwark of our island.

No enactment of man can be considered law unless it conforms to the law of God.

Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.

Free men have arms; slaves do not.

Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity.

[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society.

THIS law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.

By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage.