Linux Law

The animals are not as stupid as one thinks -- they have neither
doctors nor lawyers.
                -- L. Docquier

        The Arkansas legislature passed a law that states that the Arkansas
River can rise no higher than to the Main Street bridge in Little Rock.

The City of Palo Alto, in its official description of parking lot standards,
specifies the grade of wheelchair access ramps in terms of centimeters of
rise per foot of run.  A compromise, I imagine...

The difference between a lawyer and a rooster is that
the rooster gets up in the morning and clucks defiance.

The District of Columbia has a law forbidding you to exert pressure on
a balloon and thereby cause a whistling sound on the streets.

        The judge fined the jaywalker fifty dollars and told him if he was
caught again, he would be thrown in jail.  Fine today, cooler tomorrow.

The justifications for drug testing are part of the presently fashionable
debate concerning restoring America's "competitiveness." Drugs, it has been
revealed, are responsible for rampant absenteeism, reduced output, and poor
quality work.  But is drug testing in fact rationally related to the
resurrection of competitiveness?  Will charging the atmosphere of the
workplace with the fear of excretory betrayal honestly spur productivity?
Much noise has been made about rehabilitating the worker using drugs, but
to date the vast majority of programs end with the simple firing or the not
hiring of the abuser.  This practice may exacerbate, not alleviate, the
nation's productivity problem.  If economic rehabilitation is the ultimate
goal of drug testing, then criteria abandoning the rehabilitation of the
drug-using worker is the purest of hypocrisy and the worst of rationalization.
                -- The concluding paragraph of "Constitutional Law: The
                   Fourth Amendment and Drug Testing in the Workplace,"
                   Tim Moore, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, vol.
                   10, No. 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 762-768.

The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor,
to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
                -- Anatole France

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance.  He of all men
should behave as though the law compelled him.  But it is the universal
weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine
we own.
                -- H.G. Wells

The Least Successful Equal Pay Advertisement
        In 1976 the European Economic Community pointed out to the Irish
Government that it had not yet implemented the agreed sex equality
legislation.  The Dublin Government immediately advertised for an equal pay
enforcement officer.  The advertisement offered different salary scales for
men and women.
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"