http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v5n2/andrews521_text.html
Wormes in the entrayles: the corporate citizen in law? Neil Andrews Lecturer in law, University of Canberra
...which incidentally reproduces this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
"You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public force, and therefore you can see the practical importance of the distinction between morality and law. A man who cares nothing for an ethical rule which is believed and practised by his neighbors is likely nevertheless to care a good deal to avoid being made to pay money, and will want to keep out of jail if he can. ...
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequence which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or out-side of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience. ...
What constitutes the law? You will find some text writers telling you that it is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not which may or may not coincide with the decisions. But if we take the view of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of his mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."
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/ dave /