February 22, 2026
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion. In other words, people will always say and do what their neighbours say and do, no matter what the law allows or forbids or has nothing to say on a subject.
Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), American feminist, Why We Ask for the Submission of an Amendment(1900), Jay p. 78
MEDITATION: What popular custom do you observe that would never require a law to be binding on you and others?
COMMENTARY: Catt got that right! The tough part is when laws need to be written—and enforced—-to put an end to egregious customs long supported by popular opinion.
For instance, in the United States, or at least in some of those states, the lynching of African-Americans was for many years a popular custom that had no legal support. Yet historical data indicates approximately 4,743 lynchings occurred between 1882 and 1968—that’s 55 each year on average, more than one a week over 86 years!. Yet, lynching did not become a federal hate crime until 120 years after the first anti-lynching bill was introduced in the American Congress, and sixty-five years after Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, in 1955.
