T
here have been a number of public legal arguments regarding recent current events; the Troy Davis execution, the alleged extra-judicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and the Murdoch investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.
There seems much well-informed, well-reasoned and well-intended opinion on the moral and ethical implications of these cases, and others, which is of the calibre of the the dialogues preserved of Greek and Roman legal arguments. There is considerable merit in these public discussions on justice and propriety under the law. But most of them seem to overlook a basic point that the ancients didn’t miss, and it is summed up best by the guy who would know:
There is no such thing as justice, in or out of court.
This runs counter to progressive wisdom, and rightly so, but it remains true. And it is not just because the law is imperfect and inconsistently applied, though that is certainly a fault we must constantly seek to remedy. Fundamentally the occasional and significant absence of justice, in specific individual cases, is a feature not a bug.
Roman Law is founded on a refreshingly brief corpus of twelve tablets from 450BC which were concluded with the following phrase Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex:
Latin: the welfare of an individual yields to that of the community.Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex Lloyd Duhaime
There seems to be a fundamental tenet in our tradition of law which suspends justice for the individual in the public interest; a moral and ethical question probably worthy of our consideration.