Roger’s Rules » How Democracies Perish, British Edition
The ever percipient Janet Daley, writing in the London Telegraph, got it exactly right: Mr. Green’s arrest, and the government’s subsequent denial of knowledge of or responsibility for the actions of the police, represents a “grotesque breach of political freedom and constitutional principle.”
Except the Brits don’t actually have a, you know, written constitution. So the citizens are dependent upon the goodwill of their rulers for the maintainence of constitutional “principle.” And their rulers have no goodwill whatsoever.
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This sums up, a lot better than I can, the value (or perhaps lack thereof) of written constitutions and the like.
My opinion, should be required reading for all Americans.
I know that Learned Hand is a legal icon - especially to other lawyers - but I see that address as being mostly high-sounding horseshit.
Boiled down, it says this: “Constitutions can’t guarantee liberty, nor can I define liberty, except to say you can have too much of it, but it has something to do with Christianity.
I, frankly, don’t find that very useful.
Yes, of course constitutions can be ignored. But without them, you don’t even have to go through the bother of ignoring them. You can proceed straight to tyranny. And when weighing the value of constitutions, I think I’ll go with the intelligence of the men who wrote ours, rather than the intellectual prowess of Hand, who I think is greatly overrated.
I don’t see him as saying constitutions and written laws are useless, but that ultimately the preservation of liberty comes down to the citizenry’s desire to maintain it.
True, England has no written constitution, and is more authoritarian/statist than I would prefer, but at the same time they’re doing a lot better on that front than some countries with intricately written constitutions (cf. Venezuela). The difference being that England has a tradition of liberty, whereas Venezuela evidently believes in the caudillo.
The “too much liberty” part, is a jab at anarcho-libertarian types.
The Christianity part is interesting in that Hand, I believe, was agnostic. For my part, and as an agnostic, I find it hard to deny that we do owe the existence of some of the basic tenets of the foundings of this country to the Judeo-Christian tradition. I don’t think it’s an accident that some countries that cling to certain religious beliefs have done better than those that cling to others.