“I am the law!” and the human dimension of responsibility - 中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

“I am the law!” and the human dimension of responsibility

Authors: Marlena Atanassova

Date: 2010

I still have the t-shirt received at my law school graduation ceremony representing a sketch entitled “I am the law!” with a lawyer handling under his arm an oversized code with a person caught inside. At the time of our graduation I believed the person handling the code represents one of us, a freshly graduated jurist. Now, after several years of experience as a lawyer, I cannot be that sure and I often feel captive within pages, legal terms, articles and paragraphs.

Being lawyers, legal counsels, judges, prosecutors, or investigators, we usually think about responsibility in terms of liability, obligations, breach of contract, rule of law violations, etc. We have a tendency of interpreting and emphasising on the legal meaning of words and often oversee their sense out of this terminological context, we get nearly detached from their daily use as conceived out of the circle of the legal profession.

We are breaking responsibility down to objective and subjective, direct and indirect, personal or joint in order to apply knowledge and experience we have cumulated during the years and years of studying and practicing our profession. We also tend to refer responsibility to others – this of the other party of a contract, of the insurer or the insured, of the renter or the rentee, of the accused or the accuser, of the negligent, the reckless, the intentional and so on.

We certainly conceive ourselves as “masters” in matter of responsibility. But are we really? How often do we think about responsibility in its more “human” sense? And how often do we question our own responsibility as jurists, but out of the legal office or the court of justice and rather towards people that surround us, towards our relatives and friends?

Recently a friend who is a doctor complained to me about how difficult is to drop the white blouse when she leaves the hospital – even in her brightest evening dress people would always see her in white and think about her as “the doctor”. I thought how true this is for me – people would always see me as “the lawyer”, it is virtually impossible to get the wig off my head. Because I have been to law school, people would expect me to know about law and justice much better than them. And it goes even beyond that - my acts would represent a behavior that is presumably just and right and if they are noticeably not, others would tend to judge my “misbehaving” heavier than that of an average “non-lawyer” human being.

Caught in our daily professional routine dealing with responsibility in its legal dimensions, we often overlook this other, more human side of the term. I realise I have to think my sayings and doings through the fact that being a jurist may give them a special meaning and affect the perception of people around me about the meaning of “just and right” and consequently about myself. This is a heavy burden, which in an ironic way no professor taught us how to deal with – it is just there and we have to adapt our modus vivendi to it.

My doctor-friend mentioned an aphorism from Asclepius saying that if the patient gets well, his relatives always thank God for this, but if he/she dies – they always blame the doctor. It can be worse - if you are a jurist, the best you do our job, the most certainly you get blamed for it.

I wished to share these thoughts with our Chinese colleagues in order to inspire a discussion about the human dimension of responsibility of jurists in society and compare our experiences. This could lead to the discovery of interesting parallels or crossing points that would reflect the cultural dimensions of the legal profession.

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