Gresham's law India. Gresham's law states that any circulating currency consisting of both "good" and "bad" money (both forms required to be accepted at equal value under legal tender law) quickly becomes dominated by the "bad" money. This is because people spending money will hand over the "bad" coins rather than the "good" ones, keeping the "good" ones for themselves. Legal tender laws act as a form of price control. In such a case, the intrinsically less valuable money is preferred in exchange, because people prefer to save the intrinsically more valuable money. Consider a customer purchasing an item which costs five
Hard cases make bad law Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Its validity has since been questioned and dissenting variations include the phrase "Bad law makes hard cases", and even its opposite, "Hard cases make good law". The maxim dates at least to 1837, when a judge, ruling in favor of a parent against the maintenance of her children, said, "We have heard that hard cases make bad law." The judge's wording suggests that the phrase was not new then. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made a utilitarian argument for this in his judgment of "Northern Securities Co. v. United States" (1904): Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case,