A Man for All Seasons - The Devil Speech
A Man for All Seasons - The Devil Speech on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2019–2025.
A one-minute clip of Sir Thomas More's speech from 'A Man for All Seasons', defending giving even the devil the benefit of the law. The uploader ties it to debates about torture and extralegal action.
What HN commenters said
4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
liampullesAug 2025Recommends
Is there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms. Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move. How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: ▶ this video
in “Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England” · View on HN
ben_wOct 2023Cites it
Re first paragraph: > The only real step 1 — unless you want to get into a philosophical argument about the foundation of knowledge and the Münchhausen trilemma — is "get a law degree", which for most people is much too hard. Go and do the thing. I'm serious, if you want to make this a real actual argument and not just two random nerds locking horns on the internet (which I'm not interested in so you'd have to find a real actual lawyer to spar with after getting that degree), that's the only way — there is no other. > Also, have you heard of selective enforcement? Does it not worry you at all to see the one side consistently getting prosecuted and persecuted and the other one not at all? Do you think you're always going to be on the right side? You could've figured that one out from my own comment a few hours earlier: [link] > pour encourager les autres desole, je ne pe parle francais (seriously, I try to say that in French and my French coworker is all "quoi?" because my French is that bad) > And the sight of literally Putin doing literally the same thing doesn't trigger the least amount of thought in your mind. On the contrary, for every punishment in the systems in which I exist, I often find myself thinking back to an old movie quote: ▶ this video (This is particularly poignant to me, as a British person, because of the context of the Human Rights Act 1998 and its use in polemics during half the discussion about Brexit even though technically it's separate: I do not trust any
in “Alexei Navalny's lawyers are arrested” · View on HN
tialaramexJun 2021Cites it
> Whether Van Buren deserves punishment is a separate question from whether the legal theory the DoJ sought to use to get him punished was proper. Exactly. ▶ this video "That man's bad" / "There's no law against that" "Whilst you talk he's gone" / "And go he should, if he were the devil himself until he broke the law".
in “Van Buren is a victory against overbroad interpretations of the CFAA” · View on HN
fennecfoxenOct 2019Cites it
Who needs to establish any injury to shareholders? That company is bad! Would you give evil the benefit of the law? ▶ this video
in “Massachusetts Sues Exxon over Climate Change, Accusing the Oil Giant of Fraud” · View on HN