Fictions of law must be consistent with justice.

Nominal damages are in effect, only a peg to hang costs on.

In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true.

As the crow flies - a popular and picturesque expression to denote a straight line.

After a hard frost a man might wake in the morning and find he was breaking a covenant.

An enactment for the favour and liberty of the subject ought to have a liberal construction.

Everybody is presumed to know the law except His Majesty's judges, who have a Court of Appeal set over them to put them right.

If a man go into the London Docks sober without means of getting drunk, and comes out of one of the cellars very drunk wherein are a million gallons of wine, I think that would be reasonable evidence that he had stolen some of the wine in that cellar, though you could not prove that any wine was stolen, or any wine was missed.