The start of classes were interesting. It's slightly more low-key for me this year, being in my third year and all... no more excitement and pizzazz. Sad, but such are the dues of life. Novelty wears off eventually, but it was awesome while it lasted.
As usual, the people from the Law Society are trying to make law school the hip and happening place by having orientation events. They set up a sausage sizzle in the lawn today so students were seen with free lunch and heaps of free beer. Some were even drunk in the middle of the day! Of course, silly old me cursed because as fate would have it, the day I deign to take lunch to uni, they give out free lunch. Well, no point partaking in something you don't need now, right kids? Greed is never a good trait to have.
Jurisprudence is by far, my favourite class. It's been taken by Professor Grant Morris, the famous lecturer from first year. Yes, he has his personal fan club! We started the first class with a clip from the Gladiator and got into the natural law vs positive law debate.
Lex iniusta non est lex. Should that be your motto? Certainly, an unjust law is no law at all should one be a naturalist like Lon Fuller, who thinks that the motto is justified by the fairness of procedure. However, positivists like H L A Hart disagree in that there would be no organisation in society should people begin to disregard laws on the basis of injustice because injustice is a subjective standard. What is unjust to one might be seen as just to another. It would depend on a myriad of factors, like whether one is exacting justice or metting justice, whether one was born in a Catholic family or brainwashed by Scientology, whether one lived in an Asian society or a Western one...
Take Nazi Germany for example. We would all agree that what happened was detestable, and certainly regrettable but when the commands were issued, they were laws, were they not? They were passed through legitimate procedure and possess all the legality one could ask for... and yet, they were thoroughly unjust and will continue to be seen as unjust in this modern day.
On the other hand, one cannot disregard the Civil Union Act as not being law merely because one's personal values are incongruent to the principals of the matter. This would encourage mutiny and disorganisation. However, worlds are turned on such thoughts. The desire for revenge, the exacting of justice, the outbreak against tyranny are what marked history and moulded the world into what it is today. Without natural law, there would not have been revolutions. Jefferson would never have written with such passion, Cromwell would not have alerted the English monarch from its bloated complacency and France would still have remained a monarchy instead of the republic she is today.
I still am unsure as to where I stand on this issue, but my natural instincts tell me that an unjust law should not be law. If laws were created to regulate human nature, shouldn't they therefore be based on a set of morals? Hence, if these laws were unjust then blind acquiescence would equate to indirect oppression in terms of freedom from injustice. Ignorance would bind society from advancing as surely as blind faith would lead an evangelist astray. If so, democracy would be moot and everyone might as well be living in a dictatorship.
Penny for your thoughts?
