Before the Law (School) Costas Douzinas Christos Tastouridisin memoriam ‘What isthe role of legal education, what does it mean to earn the law? The law teacher's first duty is to understand and teach the language of justice, the breath, spirit and equity that should move the body of law. A law without justice is dead letter, body without soul, remnants and ruins of an honourable tradition. A lawyer worthy of the name nemei and katanemei; she places the requite rents of absent justice and ideal equity above the demands of power and abuses of wealth. Justice departs when the law does not meet its own sel-professed criteria but much more when the whole law (and its teaching) does not account itself to the altar of justice. t should not be necessary to remind ths othe paidia of Antigone Our law courts are adorned with a blind-folded justtia (the role of the blindfold is to stop her from seeing the concrete characteristics of the person who comes to the law by placing the abstract logic ofthe institution above the warm glow of justice). The law school on the other hand has at its pules a wide-eyed dike who looks the other in the face and promises infinte justice. ‘Those who forget this when they teach and practice law become functionaries and accountants of power, not Ieitourgoi tou kratos dikaiou but servants tou kratous. The distance between kratos and kratos di- kaiou is always small but when justice exits the law the two become identical, law the language of a power-crazed sovereign. But what i justice? We are surrounded by injustice but we don’t often know where justice lies. The ‘most painful witness of our time isthe widely-felt belief that justice has miscarried. It has been ab- orted in the IMF measures and the Athens ghettos, in the unemployed and the salary cuts for the low-paid and pensioners, in the treatment ofthe refugees in the camps of Evros and the wall built to keep the poor out and the Greeks in. its violent miscarriage is evidenced by the recent decision of ‘the European court of human rights according to which sending refugees back to Greece amounts to torture, inhuman and degrading treatment because of their inhuman living and detention conditions and because Greece virtually never gives political asylum to refugees. Belgium which was condemned for taking Greece as a humane place and sending back an. Afgahn refugee and the other Europeans will henceforth deal with the Greek government as it deserves the violator of the basic dignity of the ‘wretched of the earth. There is no 2-sylum in Greece, the refugees and the immigrants sylountai. The University asylum offers a small compensation for this much greater syle.Justice is miscarried when the Law and University Professors attempt to ‘empty’ the law school from the hunger strikers who took to sleeping there. ‘The emptying ofthe strikers i the emptying ‘of justice from the house of law. What do the people in the Law School want? To make us take notice oftheir meager, poor insignificant existence, to ask for basic labour protections and mini ‘mum living conditions. The minimum recognition that they live here, work here but have a worst ‘treatment than convicts on chain gangs. They are just saying ‘we the invisible, the uncounted and undocumented are next to you and part of what you are and what you are becoming” They are people punished not for what they have done (criminality or illegality) but for who they are, not for ‘their evi but for their abject innocence. Our own sans papiers, they are the homines sacri, persons ‘who as legally nor-existent and they are non-persons and can be treated in the most cruel way by the state or individuals, employers, landlords or the creaming minority in the stret. ‘We will hear of course that Greece isa human rights country. We teach our constitution and rights in the Law School, we have human rights orgnaisations, societies, intellectuals, ministries, synigor- ‘ous and institutions who promote them. They keep telling us that human rights belong,to humans ‘on account oftheir humanity and not of a narrower membership such as nation, state or group. ‘This isa comforting thought. But when we look atthe law school immigrants, these claims appear as one of these paradoxical half-truths that litter our ideofogy. Protesting against the worst abuses today in Greece, asking to be see heard and acknowledged in a minimum way, even ifthey need to 4g to death for that is the greatest service that these people offer to law and the law-school. They are putting professors and students face to face with what they should be teaching and learning but so many times are not, Their sacrifice (sacer facere) wil be a making sacred, a bridging of law and the teaching of law with that sense of infinite justice and hospitality, of which we can never say “here itis ‘we have servedit’ ‘now the world is good’. If they are ‘emptied’ from the house of law, the law which for these few hours and days has been filled ‘with the idea of justice or, rather the protest against absolute injustice, we will not deserve again to teach law thereor to pretend that our law and teaching has anything to do with justice. uypspDemocraciaentucara blogspot.com