Category: Scotland

The little statue that could

Les Green12 Comments

None of us achieved distinction. My father’s people were labourers drifting around Donegal, Derry, and Greenock, wherever work could be found.  My mother’s were scarcely more elevated.  They farmed the West of Scotland, produced one Free Church minister, several masons (and a lot of Masons), and a couple of petty officials. They occupied a lowly niche in the absurd hierarchy of Scotland’s clan system.  Among my seize quartiers, only my mother’s great-grandfather, Hugh Laird, was memorable.

When he was seventeen, Laird joined the 72nd Highlanders and served 12 years in India, based at Mhow as one of the ‘kilties on camels’ who helped brutally suppress the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857-58.  There is no statue to Laird, though the 72nd are magnificently honoured on the Castle Esplanade in Edinburgh.  But Laird received the medal and clasp above, and his name appears on a small memorial statue in our village.  As a child I knew a little about him (but a lot more about the uniforms of the highland regiments).

Yet it was two artefacts—a medal, and a village statue—that created an elective affinity between me, Hugh Laird, the 72nd, and India. You will not be surprised to learn they did not make a schoolboy reflect on Empire, race, or injustice. (You may be surprised to learn that the dispossession, famine, and continuing poverty among my father’s people had already done that.) The only ‘lesson’ I took from Laird is that it was possible to escape. Uniquely in his generation—and very nearly uniquely until mine—Hugh Laird went somewhere else. The rest of us remained within ten miles of where we always had been. My mother’s family were practically indigenous.

But there was a much later ripple.  As a university teacher, I became curious about 1857, the Raj, and even about medieval Indian philosophy: I spent five or six years trying to think through its bearing on the morality of speech.  I planned a book, though other things kept getting in the way of writing it.  When people asked how I ever got interested in any of that, I realized—though rarely said—that it had to do with one old medal and one little statue.   Any number of other things could, and perhaps should, have been more powerful spurs to my interest:  one friend was a Professor of Commonwealth History, another a Professor of Sanskrit; I made my own living as a Professor of the Philosophy of Law.  But for me it took a personal, material connection to care about an old injustice and how we might now help remedy it.

There is nothing generalizable here. That is my point. When Simon Schama says it is silly to suppose that removing statues might ‘erase’ history and that, ‘It is more usually statues, lording it over civic space, which shut off debate in their invitation to reverence’, all I can say is that may be true in some cases. But neither a grand statue in Edinburgh, nor a tiny one in a Scottish village, were able to silence me. Just the contrary. More than anything else I encountered in life, they established a link between me and a country I never visited, an injustice my people never felt, and a civilisation I could admire only from a philosophical distance. I certainly had views about England and Empire, but the racism and oppression I worried about had previously involved only its other provinces.

That tiny connection made me care about what had happened at Mhow and Lucknow, but they never made me proud of it. I never revered the Raj, the 72nd, or even Hugh Laird.  Public artefacts bear social meanings; but how those meanings affect us can be hard to predict. I can think of no more reason why we should be ‘originalists’ about the meaning of statues than about the meaning of statutes.  It rarely matters what a statue meant; what matters is what it now means–and that is often a complex matter.

A Lenten thought on good Samaritans

Les Green6 Comments

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In an article published twenty-years ago, Christopher Wellman introduced legal philosophers to the idea that the duty to obey the law might be based on a duty to do one’s fair share in assisting others.  For reasons that puzzled me, Kit called these ‘Samaritan duties.’  The paper deserved and got lots of discussion, and ‘Samaritan duties’ entered the jurisprudential vocabulary.  I’ve heard someone say Catalans owe a ‘Samaritan duty’ not to seek independence from Spain (Catalonia being a more wealthy part of a less wealthy country), and last week a desperate unionist even told me that Scots now have a ‘Samaritan duty’ not to abandon the United Kingdom (Scotland being a relatively humane part of an increasingly inhumane country).

I admired Wellman’s article, and still do, though I think his argument mistaken.  (Admiring things one considers mistaken used to be normal amongst philosophers.)  But I never understood why Kit thought a duty of beneficence was particularly ‘Samaritan’.  I had one lawyerly worry and one philosophical worry.

Our legal systems have two mechanisms that push back against the selfishness they often aid and abet.  The first is the duty of (easy) rescue, more common in civilian systems than in common law.  The second is not a duty but an immunity.  ‘Good Samaritan statutes’ protect certain people from liability when their good-faith attempts to help others go wrong. A duty to help is different from a Samaritan immunity, though both can deflect tort liability.  So why didn’t Wellman just say his theory was based on a duty to rescue, or more generally on a duty of beneficence?  It was (to me) confusing.

More important than nomenclature, however, is the fact that the Samaritan story in Luke’s gospel (10:25) is not there to teach us to help others in need.  That principle was already entrenched in the Hebrew scriptures and would have been well known to the priest and the Levite who crossed the road to avoid the man robbed, stripped and left for dead.   Nothing in Luke’s story intimates that priests or Levites were devotees of Ayn Rand.  The theological point is that a body in that state could have been ritually unclean—a corpse–so  Jews would then face a conflict of duties: to get close up and help, and to stay away from what could be a dead body.    (Today we might think of American evangelicals who say they are to love all sinners, and also that America has a duty to keep out destitute migrants, who could be rapists and drug dealers.)

The duty to rescue is simply taken for granted by Luke. And not easy rescue:  the hated Samaritan goes far beyond that.  What then is the point?  Remember the context.  A lawyer (νομικός) is trying to trip up (ἐκπειράζων) Jesus, an illiterate peasant getting too big for his boots.  The lawyer asks what he should do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus returns with the question: What do the scriptures say?  The lawyer recites the answer they both know well.  It includes the duty to ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ (Lev. 19:18) The crunch follows. The lawyer thinks he has now cornered Jesus and asks, ‘and who is my neighbour (τίς ἐστίν μου πλησίον)?  The tone of the question is: and exactly who is my neighbour?  Where exactly do we draw the line?  Jesus’ shocking, over-the-top, answer is absolutely anyone you can actually help, even an enemy, and even at very substantial cost to yourself.

There is something wonderfully anti-nominian in the parable.  Every lawyer knows tactical uses of the question ‘but where would we draw the line?’  But they do not always know that it demands different responses in different contexts.

In North America, we approach not only Lent but income tax season, in which those with resources pay lawyers and accountants get just as close as they can to the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion.  Maybe that is OK.  But in other contexts, our attitude to law’s lines should be: ‘stay well back!’  How do we draw the line between enhanced interrogation and torture, between persuasion and coercion, between misleading and outright fraud?  There is no good, general, answer.  But when we have the line, we should not be trying to get as close to it as we might get away with.

Law is filled with ‘line-drawing exercises’.  It is part of the law’s function to lay down lines in areas where, absent law, no lines exist.  We need lines for guidance, and sometimes for fairness.  But the Good Samaritan parable is mainly about the spirit in which we are to approach law’s lines.  If a ritual duty forbids touching what could be a corpse, the Samaritan duty tells us to push up hard against the artificial line dividing reasonable fear and opportunistic avoidance, even at significant cost to ourselves.

How do we distinguish lines that we may push up against from lines from which we should stay back?  I don’t know, and Luke gives us no help.  But it seems to me that when it comes to the destitute and despised, we do well to push up hard against whatever line suggests we may or should leave them to die by the roadside, or in the refugee camp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Spain violates the rule of law

Les Green2 Comments

The least important fact about the prospect of Catalonia declaring independence from Spain is that such a declaration would be void under the Spanish constitution.   The most important  is that Rajoy’s government seems willing to hold Catalonia against its will, and even by force.

It unthinkable that Canada would attempt to hold Quebec captive should it vote to leave the federation. It is unthinkable that the United Kingdom would send in  troops to keep control of Scotland or Northern Ireland.  Yet neither state has any constitutional provision for regional or national independence.   The Canadian federal government, though formally limited in its jurisdiction, has vast powers to invade provincial domains. The Westminster Parliament is  unconstrained, and could abolish the Scottish Parliament entirely. It is not any legal difference that explains why neither Canada nor the United Kingdom would behave in such ways. It is a matter of political culture and public morality.

It is true that Canada and the United Kingdom have a deeper and longer loyalty to democracy than does Spain—but that is not the whole story. The larger difference is over another ideal, that of popular sovereignty. It is ultimately for peoples to decide by whom they shall be governed.  Popular sovereignty includes the right to make that decision wrongly, and in some cases even to make it in a way that impedes democracy. If Syrians were to freely vote for a theocracy, no other nation should intervene to prevent them.

Some people admit only  a thin version of this ideal. They say only colonized or oppressed peoples are entitled to self-determination; everyone else must accept their lot and work within existing law, no matter what.  Canadians and the British reject that view. They do not think Quebec or Scotland have the right to decide their futures because they are oppressed by their central governments.   On the contrary, they would fiercely deny that proposition and yet  still respect the will of the minority nations within their borders.

But what about the rule of law? Must the illegality of any unilateral declaration of independence violate this ideal?  The question is more complex than some suppose.

First, if there is any conflict between popular sovereignty and the rule of law we still need decide which should prevail. The idea that existing law should always rule, and  be obeyed, no matter what is a repugnant principle. It is one that kept Spain under a dictatorship for years.

Second, and more important, it is not obvious that an unconstitutional declaration of independence on the part of Catalonia would violate the rule of law. To see why, think again about Canada and the United Kingdom. Each not only tolerates but makes possible a lawful route to independence for  minority nations.

In Canada, a route to the independence of Quebec is secured by the authority of the 1998 Supreme Court decision in the Reference re Secession of Quebec. The decision did not amend or reinterpret the Canadian constitution.  It directed how Canada’s government should respond to any declaration of independence: by good faith negotiation. In the United Kingdom, a lawful route to independence is secured by Parliament’s demonstrated willingness, in Northern Ireland and in Scotland, not only to respect the result of a border poll or an independence referendum, but to provide for, regularize, and recognize such votes. Canada and the UK make possible, and lawful, what Spain leaves to pressure and violence.  Spain’s fundamental law renders independence unlawful.  It  takes a difficult political eventuality for which many countries must somehow provide and puts it beyond the realm of legality.

So is Madrid, not Barcelona, that violates the the rule of law.  In denying any lawful route to independence, in disrupting polls, in assaulting voters, and in threatening to remove the regional government of Catalonia, Spain also shows contempt for one of the central ideals of the European Union.   And, in refusing to condemn this, the European Union  collaborates in an attack on popular sovereignty, and on the rule of law itself.

 

 

 

Should Parliamentary Sovereignty Trump Popular Sovereignty?

Les Green27 Comments

On June 23rd the UK referendum on membership in the European Union delivered a clear, if narrow, result: the country should leave. Much still remains open, but as far as that issue is concerned, the matter is decided. I’m sure that British voters had no view about which mechanism would transfer their decision into law; but they understood that something would. No one supposed that a clear result might be treated as a helpful hint to politicians, or as a preliminary comment in a national seminar on the constitution.

Today’s judgment in the High Court repudiates that understanding. (R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union). Lord Thomas of Cymgiedd CJ, Sir Terence Etherton MR, and Lord Sales decided that the UK executive lacks any power to transmit the will of the people into law by triggering the notification procedure for exit that is outlined in the EU Treaty. The court holds that the absolute sovereignty of Parliament must be respected, and that such prerogative power as the executive has to act in international affairs, including  treaties, can never repeal rights in domestic law. So Parliament must still decide whether to leave the EU. The matter remains open.

The breadth of the doctrine is breathtaking. The court does not merely say that Parliament is not, in this case, strictly bound by the referendum result; it declares that any popular vote is of zero legal relevance until Parliament expressly chooses otherwise. It is not even legally persuasive: ‘a referendum on any topic can only be advisory for the lawmakers in Parliament unless very clear language to the contrary is used in the referendum legislation in question.’ [emphasis added]

If the Supreme Court confirms this decision, the entire national debate on the EU can begin over: in the House of Commons, in the (unelected) House of Lords, then possibly back again to the courts, or maybe even the electorate. And that is what the claimants want: delay and time for second thoughts and further lobbying–not on the ground that the referendum result was unclear or the procedure unfair, but on the ground that the question was wrongly decided.

I agree that the question was wrongly decided. I also think that referendums are a very poor instrument of ordinary governance. But when what is at stake is the boundary of a constitutional people, we have no better procedure than a referendum, and courts should use their powers to uphold, rather than undermine, the result. Those who regret the result (as I do) should spend less time trying to overturn or forestall it, and more time trying to rally opinion around one of the better options that it has left open. Lawyers shouldn’t feel sidelined: whatever happens there will be work for them.

Democracy is government by the people. But the definition of ‘the people’ is not a matter solely for Parliament. It is matter prior to parliamentary democracy, and the legitimacy of Parliament depends on settling it correctly. The people have a right to decide for themselves the most basic terms of their constitution, including the people who will empowered by that constitution. That is why it is for Scots to decide whether to remain in the UK—and not for the UK as a whole; and why it is for the British to decide whether to remain in the EU—and not for the other member states.

What we might call English Constitutional Theory has long distrusted popular sovereignty.  An influential line of thought running from Hobbes, through Blackstone and Bentham, to Dicey and Jennings, equates popular sovereignty with Parliamentary sovereignty. Even today, the High Court repeats with approval Dicey’s words : ‘The judges know nothing about any will of the people except in so far as that will is expressed by an Act of Parliament’. Of course, it is plausible to think that the ‘will of the people’ needs practical expression. But when we have—as Dicey did not—lawfully organized and fair referendum procedures, it is implausible that only an Act of Parliament can ever speak for the people.

The UK has a fluid, informal constitution, and when disputes about its basic ground rules reach our courts, they generally lie in a penumbral zone where, whatever judges pretend, their decisions not only have political consequences but are made, and can only be properly made, on grounds of political morality. There are no ‘purely legal’ decisions at this level.

Today’s decision sidelines an important principle of political morality. It is not inexorably driven to do so by law or by logic. The judgment depends on two propositions that remain as debatable after the decision as they were before: (1) that the UK’s notification to withdraw from the EU cannot be made conditional on anything, and (2) that the European Communities Act 1972 not only gives EU law direct effect in UK courts, but also makes it part of UK law. Since the parties all accepted (1), the court did not test it. On (2), the court rejected the government’s argument that rights of British citizens under EU law result from an interaction of domestic and European law, and do not rest in domestic law alone.  Legal philosophers have struggled with the general issue at stake in (2).  Compare:  if conflict-of-laws rules sometimes require English courts to give effect to French law, does that make French law part of domestic English law?  It is a delicate question.  The Court makes short shrift of it.  Oddly, given its enthusiasm for Dicey’s doctrine that Parliament is omnicompetent, and its insistence that it only addresses ‘purely legal’ questions, the court  declares  (2) wrong because it is unrealistic: ‘In a highly formalistic sense this may be accurate. But in our view it is a submission which is divorced from reality.’

I wish the court’s desire to shape the law with an eye to reality had gripped it in some more helpful way. Since the UK is a union of peoples, not just one people, the declaration that any referendum, on any matter at all, can only ever be advisory will not go down well in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland. Nor will the conclusion, which follows inexorably, that Westminster can by explicit legislation repeal the Scotland Act 2016, notwithstanding what ‘a decision of the people of Scotland voting in a referendum’ (s 63 A) might have to say about the matter.  Does the Act itself give such a referendum legal force?  If so, it only takes a simple majority, which might consist only of English MPs, to amend or repeal it.

Contrast the more sensitive, and sensible, approach of the Supreme Court of Canada when addressing the constitutional significance of a possible referendum result in favour of Québec independence:

‘The continued existence and operation of the Canadian constitutional order cannot remain indifferent to the clear expression of a clear majority of Quebecers that they no longer wish to remain in Canada.  This would amount to the assertion that other constitutionally recognized principles necessarily trump the clearly expressed democratic will of the people of Quebec.’ (Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217)

The formulation is inexact, but the idea is sound. The idea that ‘other constitutionally recognized principles’ necessarily trump any clear expression of popular sovereignty is a danger to the continued existence and operation of any constitutional order. The Canadian Court knew that to endorse that idea could risk national calamity. By their judgment they changed, if only marginally, the basic ground rules of the Canadian legal system. It was a wise move.  Perhaps our Supreme Court will follow it?

Popular sovereignty is a moral ideal. Parliamentary sovereignty is an institutional device, helpful where it secures important values, but a hindrance when it does not.

 

The UK government’s policies, in style and substance

Les GreenLeave a comment

We have been absolutely clear: it is right that we ring fence national security and investigatory powers, even if many oppose us on an industrial scale, depriving as they do hard-working families of choice in striving for British values in a high wage, low-welfare economy, where never again need anything but English votes stand in the way of a truly seven-day NHS, an end to failing schools, and a reformed Europe. Also, we love Scotland.

Wednesday’s Child: My job description grows again

Les Green10 Comments

Every year, my job description gets longer. Research and teaching, obviously, and a share of university administration ancillary to that. (For instance, preparing the Law faculty’s REF submission and, more dangerously, chairing my college’s Coffee Committee [OfCoff!].

For the professoriate, these things have always come with the territory. Now, however, I am also drafted as a delegate authority to assist the government in implementing its political agenda. The UK’s self-destructive policies on migration, including the admission of foreign students, are to be monitored by people like me. I have a duty to report how often I lay eyes on my visa students. (What if Oxford students are not really having panic attacks in the library but are actually off in Isis training camps?) I also have a ‘prevent’ duty to make sure they aren’t being sucked into terrorism. (What if they come to believe John Locke’s claim that one may make a violent ‘appeal to heaven’ whenever the rulers try to govern without consent?)

My own view—I wish the Vice Chancellor would endorse it—is that these new duties must not only be ‘balanced against’ my duty to support academic freedom and my Public Sector Equality Duty to advance the status of protected groups—they must be subject to them.  Academic freedom and social equality should be side-constraints within which any ‘prevent’ duty or duty to monitor migration is exercised. Otherwise, the essential bond of trust between teacher and student will be ruptured, and the status of our universities will be undermined.

Consider this. If I do not see a postgraduate student at least three times in eight weeks, I need to report that to the administration.   If I have concerns about why I have not seen her, I need to report those too.  If I fear a student is being ‘radicalised’ I also need to report that. How will I know? The University has a duty to train me: ‘We would expect appropriate members of staff to have an understanding of the factors that make people support terrorist ideologies or engage in terrorist-related activity.’ Of course, the University can’t know what ‘factors’ cause support for ‘terrorist ideologies’ until it knows which ideologies are actually ‘terrorist’. No worries— ‘BIS offers free training for higher and further education staff through its network of regional higher and further education Prevent co-ordinators. ‘ I am not making this up.

Today, I learn that the government is pressing ahead with legislation to ensure that the security services have access to a year’s worth of our online data, including a complete list of every website you accessed. (If you haven’t done so, download Tor now, and browse with nothing else until this legislation is repealed or, if you are in Scotland, until independence frees you from still more English insanity.) The availability of this information will feed into the duty to monitor migration and prevent terrorism.

It isn’t hard to see where this could lead.  I’ve only seen a visa postgraduate twice in eight weeks? Her email says she is away conducting research in Washington. But we can check to see if she has accessed our servers, and from where, and what she is searching for.  We have a duty to keep that data.   A student used to favour power-sharing in Northern Ireland but now jokes that the DUP needs a whiff of gelignite?  I can alert the university to check out his Facebook and Twitter feeds.  Indeed, I must. The statutory guidance says:

‘Radicalised students can also act as a focal point for further radicalisation through personal contact with fellow students and through their social media activity. … Changes in behaviour and outlook may be visible to university staff. Much of this guidance therefore addresses the need for RHEBs to have the necessary staff training, IT policies and student welfare programmes to recognise these signs and respond appropriately.’

It is clear that this government cares little about academic freedom, civil liberties, or social equality. More surprisingly, they seem to care little about the competitive position of our leading universities. (Our opposite numbers at Yale or Harvard are not burdened by any of this–nor by REF or TEF.)   So where are our senior administrators on the issue?  Where is UUK? Where is the professoriate of the ‘elite’ Russell Group of British universities?  I guess they are all off at free BIS training sessions on how to recognize and prevent radicalization among  students.  Or perhaps at job interviews at U.S. universities.