Before the Law (School)

What is the role of legal edu­ca­tion, what does it mean to learn the law? The law teacher’s first duty is to under­stand and teach the lan­guage of justice, the breath, spirit and equity that should move the body of law. A law without justice is dead let­ter, body without soul, rem­nants and ruins of an hon­our­able tra­di­tion. A law (nomos) worthy of the name nemei and katane­mei, dis­trib­utes and sep­ar­ates. But it does so by pla­cing the require­ments of absent justice and ideal equity above the demands of power and abuses of wealth. Justice departs when the law does not meet its own self-​professed cri­teria but much more when the whole law (and its teach­ing) does not account itself to the altar of justice. It should not be neces­sary to remind this to the chil­dren of Antigone.

Our law courts are adorned with a blind-​folded Justi­tia (the role of the blind­fold is to stop her from see­ing the con­crete char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the per­son who comes to the law by pla­cing the abstract logic of the insti­tu­tion above the warm glow of justice). The law school on the other hand has at its pules (gates) a wide-​eyed dike who looks the other in the face and prom­ises infin­ite justice. Those who for­get this when they teach and prac­tice law become func­tion­ar­ies and account­ants of power, not lei­t­our­goi tou kratos dikaiou but ser­vants tou krat­ous. The dis­tance between the state and the state of law (recht­staat, rule of law) is always small but when justice exits the law state and law become identical, law the lan­guage of a power-​crazed sovereign.

But what is justice? We are sur­roun­ded by injustice but we don’t often know where justice lies. The most pain­ful wit­ness of our time is the widely-​felt belief that justice has mis­car­ried. It has been abor­ted in the IMF meas­ures and the Athens ghet­tos, in the unem­ployed and the salary cuts for the low-​paid and pen­sion­ers, in the treat­ment of the refugees in the camps in the Greco-​Turkish bor­ders and the wall built to keep the poor out and the Greeks in. Its viol­ent mis­car­riage is evid­enced by the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights accord­ing to which send­ing refugees back to Greece amounts to tor­ture, inhu­man and degrad­ing treat­ment because of their inhu­man liv­ing and deten­tion con­di­tions and because Greece vir­tu­ally never gives polit­ical asylum to refugees. Bel­gium which was con­demned for tak­ing Greece as a humane place and send­ing back an Afghan refugee and the other Europeans will hence­forth deal with the Greek gov­ern­ment as it deserves: the viol­ator of the basic dig­nity of the wretched of the earth. There is no a-​sylum (lack of viol­ence, absence of abuse) in Greece, the refugees and the immig­rants are viol­ated. The Uni­ver­sity asylum offers a small com­pens­a­tion for this much greater violence.

Justice is mis­car­ried when the Law and Uni­ver­sity Pro­fess­ors attempt to ‘empty’ the law school from the hun­ger strikers who took to sleep­ing there. The empty­ing of the strikers is the empty­ing of justice from the house of law. What do the people in the Law School want? To make us take notice of their mea­gre, poor insig­ni­fic­ant exist­ence, to ask for basic labour pro­tec­tions and min­imum liv­ing con­di­tions. The min­imum recog­ni­tion that they live here, work here but are treated worse than con­victs on chain gangs. They are just say­ing ‘we the invis­ible, the uncoun­ted and undoc­u­mented are next to you and part of what you are and what you are becom­ing.’ They are people pun­ished not for what they have done (crimin­al­ity or illeg­al­ity) but for who they are, not for their evil but for their abject inno­cence. The Greek sans papi­ers are hom­ines sacri, per­sons who as leg­ally non-​existent are non-​persons and can be treated in the most cruel way by the state or indi­vidu­als, employ­ers, land­lords or the scream­ing minor­ity in the street.

We will hear of course that Greece is a human rights coun­try. We teach our con­sti­tu­tion and rights in the Law School, we have human rights organ­isa­tions, soci­et­ies, intel­lec­tu­als, min­is­tries, ombuds­men and insti­tu­tions who pro­mote them. They keep telling us that human rights belong to humans on account of their human­ity and not of a nar­rower mem­ber­ship such as nation, state or group. This is a com­fort­ing thought. But when we look at the law school immig­rants, these claims appear as one of those para­dox­ical half-​truths that lit­ter our ideo­logy. Protest­ing against the worst abuses today in Greece, ask­ing to be seen, heard and acknow­ledged in a min­imum way, even if they need to die to do it, is the greatest ser­vice that these people offer to law and the law school. They are put­ting pro­fess­ors and stu­dents face to face with what they should be teach­ing and learn­ing but so many times are not. Their sac­ri­fice (sacer facere) will be a mak­ing sac­red, a bridging of law and the teach­ing of law with that sense of infin­ite justice and hos­pit­al­ity, of which we can never say ‘here it is’ ‘we have served it’ ‘now the world is good’.

If they are ‘emp­tied’ from the house of law, the law which for these few hours and days has been filled with the idea of justice or, rather the protest against abso­lute injustice, we will never again deserve to teach law there or to pre­tend that our law and teach­ing has any­thing to do with justice.

Cos­tas Douz­i­nas is Pro­fessor of Law and Dir­ector of the Birk­beck Insti­tute for the Human­it­ies, Uni­ver­sity of London

Trans­lated by Hara Kouki

Tags: Greece

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