Usury laws
idea · 2 works · 4 mentions · 5 anchored passages
the usury laws · usury laws
in the texts
Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England
Laws restricting interest rates on loans, used as an example of delayed legislative response to argument.
The usury laws were wholly repealed in 1854, that is sixty-seven years after Bentham had demonstrated their futility;
But this Act, though produced by temporary feeling, not only revives the usury laws, but gives expression and authority to beliefs supposed to have been confuted by reason.
Is it certain that the legislators who passed the Money-lenders Act, 1900, might not have hesitated formally to re-enact the usury laws which Parliament deliberately repealed in 1854?
Law in a Free State
Historical laws restricting or forbidding interest-taking, cited as an analogous example of paternalistic State legislation whose defence has failed.
It is on all-fours with the defence of the usury laws, with the defence of State-enforced religion, with the defence of the old sumptuary laws, and with hundreds of other State measures of past and present times, forbidding the people to rush on to their own destruction.