It’s time to write an obituary.
The concept of Justice is founded on two other ideas:
- Rights: The idea that individuals possess certain unalienable rights, and that all violations of those rights are inherently unjust.
- Rule of Law: The idea that the law is supreme over all persons, regardless of their identities or any property attached to them.
Law, therefore, is instituted to protect individuals’ rights, and is enforced uniformly against all who violate its terms.
Some laws are unjustifiable, in that either their provisions or their enforcement will invade individuals’ rights. We can pass over such laws in silence for the moment, noting simply that an unjust law contradicts the first of the two pillars of Justice. However, the subject can and should be visited at greater length in the future.
Some laws are more easily justified than others. Many – I’m one – have criticized aspects of the laws pertaining to the protection of classified information. Those laws don’t appear to protect any individual right. However, they do pertain to the military defense of the United States, to its foreign relations, and to the operations of its intelligence-gathering agencies. These things are at least indirectly connected to the rights of Americans: specifically, their right not to be killed by, or placed in bondage to, a hostile power.
But for the Rule of Law to be maintained, the enforcement of the law must be uniform: dismissive of the personal identities and statuses of those accused of violating it. If there are persons, even in theory, who are exempt from the provisions or the enforcement of the law, Justice is not served but destroyed: a channel through it has been opened by which such persons can commit unjust acts without penalty in complete contradiction of the Rule of Law.
The existence of unjust laws is important, but it can be rectified. The existence of protected statuses – characteristics or achievements that can exempt someone from a law that binds others – is both devastating and uncorrectable. Nor does it matter whether such statuses are themselves defined by the law or are arrived at post facto.
Particular instances of injustices committed under color of law can be redressed. An example has just been provided to us: the police executions of unarmed persons, entirely without rationale. Those killings were not accidental but deliberate. Therefore, the involved police are themselves lawbreakers. But Rights can still be protected and the Rule of Law maintained if those police are compelled to face indictment, trial, and (if convicted) the appropriate penalty for their crimes. Indeed, that’s the whole point of the justice system.
However, once lawbreakers – persons who have indisputably violated the law according to its text – are permitted to “skate” because of some aspect of their status, the Rule of Law comes tumbling down. In its place arises a Society of Status, in which one’s social, economic, or political placement determines one’s vulnerability to the law. Such a society differs in no important way from one hagridden by a hereditary aristocracy: one in which the son of a baron can rape and murder a peasant girl and get completely away with it.
Though I was appalled by the behavior of the accomplished David Petraeus in providing classified information to his wholly uncleared mistress, I was heartened when he was compelled to face the music. It suggested that, as with the penalties visited upon Vice President Spiro Agnew for corruption, political elevation is still no protection against being brought to justice. Perhaps, I thought, Justice still stands despite the slew of unjust laws and the occasionally successful attempts by the highly placed to escape their reach.
But with the politically motivated – really, can there be any other explanation? – exoneration of Hillary Clinton for her multiple and indisputable violations of the explicit texts of the National Security Act and the Espionage Act, Justice has crumbled. Ours is now a Society of Status, in which having attained high office, or descent from a high official, or attachment by marriage to one such can win oneself free of the grip of a law that would inescapably envelop any “ordinary” American.
How does it feel to know that you’re ruled by a noble class, Gentle Reader?
Law has lost its soul and become jungle. – Bertrand de Jouvenel
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