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| Lord Johnston (see below) is the man on the left |
One
of the worst offences against etiquette which a writer can commit in the
public, as opposed to the private, sphere it to write without regard to the
reader. When writers start, in effect, talking to themselves then the basic
purpose of putting finger to keyboard, which is to communicate, is lost.
I
wrote on 5 December 2013 about the difference between the language used by the
President of the Constitutional Court of Russia, Professor Valery Zorkin, and
the famous English judge and obstrepulist (that is a word I have just made up
to define someone who enjoys being obstreperous) of the 1960s-80s, Lord
Denning. See this link. Professor Zorkin reveals by his language his legal
elitism, while Lord Denning parades (perhaps a little ostentatiously) his
“common man” approach.
Legal
elitism of the sort Professor Zorkin displays lies at the heart of most systems
of non-military authoritarianism. The state and its senior officers have a
language that the common people do not understand. They depend for their power
on their ability to keep the people mute in the forum where it counts: the law.
One of the reasons for the state of governance in Russia today is the lack of
pubic participation, and one of the reasons for that is that law is in the
hands of legal elitists. One of the reasons for that is the unreasoning
admiration which Russian legal scholars have had for the last hundred and fifty
years or so for German legal scholarship. I write all this because I recently
came across a staggering example of what I mean: a German who managed to make
Professor Zorkin look positively lucid.
Call
me sad, but I spend most of my mornings in bed with a huge mug of Earl Grey tea
reading stuff like the Boston College Law Review and the Harvard Law
Review. Yesterday morning I was enjoying a long article in the former
journal, by one Mathias Reimann, entitled “Nineteenth Century German Legal
Science” (Vol. 31, 1990, p. 837 if anyone wants to read the rest). On page 863
I came upon a quote from Rudolf von Jhering, one the greatest German legal
scientists of that century, after von Savigny. It is taken from his book Geist
des Römischen Rechts (The
Spirit of Roman Law) volume 2, published in 1865. This passage was considered
so important by Mr Reimann that he quoted it as an example of “organic” trend
in mid-nineteenth century, academic jurisprudence in Germany. If anyone can
make any sense at all out of this, I will be surprised. I give it to you as an
example of how NOT to write!
“[The essence of law] does not lie in the fact that the law cannot be
understood without its systematic coherence, because this is the case with any
object of knowledge. In law, the distinctive characteristic of the systematic
task is that the particular is not only, as in any other science, put in its
right place, but that this formal process has a substantive effect on the
subject matter, that this procedure causes an internal transubstantiation of
the maxims of law. The maxims of law take on an elevated condition, they strip
off their quality as commands and prohibitions and form themselves into the
elements and qualities of legal institutions. A layman would hardly deem it
possible how in the legal concepts, classifications, etc., in short, in the
dogmatic logic, there can be a practical meaning more intensive than in the
maxims of law. This logic of the law is, so to speak, the blossom, the praecipitat
(sic) of the maxims of law; in one single, correctly stated concept
there lies perhaps the substantive contents of ten prior maxims of law.”
This morning, I read a
shorter article in the Harvard Law Review (Vol 9, 1895, p. 27) entitled
“Judicial Precedents – a Short Study in Comparative Jurisprudence”. The author,
one John Chipman Grey, explained how German law in the middle ages had many
features of the common law system. It was based on ancient custom and therefore
relied heavily on precedent. It also made use of juries and therefore could not
have been elitist since ordinary people sitting on those juries had to be able
to understand what went on in court. But all that started to change at the end
of the eighteenth century when jurists like von Savigy decided the law had to
be “purified”. Customary procedure was considered rustic and embarrassing—what
Russians like Professor Zorkin would call провинциальный (provincial). In order for the country to be respectable, this had to
be replaced by
something closer to the classical Roman “ideal”.
Mr Grey’s point was that the
people who destroyed the customary law in Germany were able to do so only because
the tradition of allowing non-lawyers, including law professors, to sit in high
legal forums. This allowed the busy-body, self-promoting professors to gain
control of the court organization. They used their resulting control to exclude
other lay people and promote the idea that the only people who ought to be
taken seriously were academic jurists like themselves. (This echoes the way
conservationists in Britain today have elbowed farmers and other country people
out of the business of caring for nature—see my book Isles of the West.)
Judges were relegated to the lower function of merely applying the law which
had been worked out in academia by the likes of Herr Jhering. That is how law
lost contact with the people. This is what Mr Gray has to say about the
subject:
“The introduction of the
Roman law into Germany and its driving out of the ancient law were mainly due
mainly to doctors of civil law acquiring judicial positions. This seems to be
the conclusion reached by all the late writers. But the modern German civilians
[i.e. proponents of Roman law] have rather ungratefully kicked down the ladder
by which they themselves climbed, and exhibit a great repugnance to recognize
judicial decisions or Gerichtsgebrauch [i.e. precedent] in any form as a source
of law.”
Whatever else may be said
about all this, I think it would be fair to remark that Mr Grey’s prose is more
comprehensible than Herr Jhering’s. A jury would be more likely to understand
it. In one sense, it is anti-elitist simply in its lucidity.
The importance of all this
lies in the fact that the European Union has, like Russia today, a legal
tradition that is very much influenced by the German approach to jurisprudence.
It is wordy and elitist. The dark heart of this elitism lies in the dead language
of both European Union Directives and European Court of justice judgments.
Let me contrast that with a
scene I witnessed in a Scottish court about fifteen years ago. Two European
Directives, the Habitats and the Birds Directives, were being considered in
relation to the issue of shooting geese which eat the grass farmers have grown
to feed their sheep and cattle. The issue had arisen on the isle of Islay,
where I used to live. I quote from an article I wrote in The Ileach
about the case. It concerns the judge who is at the front of the procession
which is pictured on the cover of my book, The Justice Factory (see
above). Though sadly now dead, he was a wonderful man, called Lord Johnston,
who was commonly thought to have a feel for the just solution to any case which
came before him, and he permitted himself to use the law to achieve an
equitable outcome to all disputes he was called upon to decide.
In this case, he also
displayed a thorough disdain for the language of modern European legal
drafting. In the exchange below, he is being addressed by the advocate, Sir
Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw, who was representing a pharisaic bird protection
society, the RSPB, which thought that farmers ought to be compelled to buy hay
to feed their livestock while they allowed the geese to eat the grass which
they had grown to feed their animals. That is typical of the logic of modern
conservationism—the birds come first. But my point here is about language. This
is my record of what Lord Johnston had to say on the matter (the case is
described briefly on p. 257 of The Justice Factory):
“What My Lord will have to construe,” Sir Crispin said to
the Judge, “is the meaning of ‘satisfactory solution’.”
The reason was that whereas the Habitats Directive talks
about satisfactory solutions, the Birds Directive refers to satisfactory
alternatives.
“I would submit that alternative is wider than solution,”
Sir Crispin continued.
Lord Johnston took off his spectacles, and swung them
round by the legs while gazing up at one of the patches of paint flaking off
the ceiling. He could have been construing, but he looked to me as if he was
thinking about lunch. Paying farmers to buy in hay to replace the grass eaten
by the geese would represent a “satisfactory alternative”, Sir Crispin went on,
and therefore render any shooting illegal. The Judge put his specs back on,
looked closely at his copy of the two Directives and said to no-one in
particular, “Who writes this stuff?”
A Russian
acquaintance phoned me yesterday about sundowner time because she wanted to
tell me that World War Three was going to break out soon.
In today’s Moscow Times, one of the paper’s
best and most civilized columnists, Chris Weafer (who writes about economics), makes an uncharacteristic mistake. In the course of an interesting article about the long-run primacy of economics over politics for politicians who wish
to stay popular, he writes:
This clip from the BBC about Peaches Geldof's funeral, ends by saying, “Her cause of death remains unexplained.”
