Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

216 W. J. M. Mackenzie
unity: the audience is structured. In a rough general way, from the rest of our
knowledge about politics, we can guess how the audience is structured: but the
general knowledge has not been related closely to operational devices for measur-
ing the range and impact of political communication, and of political language
in general.
This is technically a very difficult field, but it is a particularly important one,
in that the range and intensity of political communication help to delimit
the boundaries of viable systems and sub-systems (Section 1vB.3 aboveb. 191)
on the process of political unification).
b. Private andprocedural rights. The heading of this section implies a theory
which has never been adequately tested. The theory is that the legal protection
of public rights arises out of and depends upon the habitual use of legal proce-
dure in defending private rights. It is claimed:
i) That the habit of using courts of law, reinforced by successful use, extends
from cases between citizens to cases between citizens and public authorities.
ii) That litigation depends on lawyers, and that a strong legal profession, in
protecting its own interests politically, helps to propagate the idea of judicial
protection of rights.
iii) That procedure evolved in litigation between citizens is carried over into
litigation between citizens and the State; and that these common procedural
assumptions are as important as (perhaps more important than) the way in
which the substantive rights of citizens are specified.
In constitutional States, there is a fair measure of agreement about the private
rights which the law-courts should defend against interference either by indivi-
duals or by public authorities except in so far as the interference is sanctioned
by ‘due process of law’: rights of private property except in so far as it is
used contrary to law, freedom from arrest except under judicial warrant or in
face of immediate danger, freedom of speech not libellous or slanderous, and
so on.
There is also a fair measure of agreement on three ‘principles of natural jus-
tice’; that no man should be compelled to incriminate himself, that all parties to
a case should be heard (audi alteram partem), that the judge must be free from
any suspicion of partiality. Perhaps there is less agreement on a fourth point
of critical importance, the cases of emergency in which public authorities are
entitled to override the law temporarily, under the old Roman maxims - ‘dent
operam consules ne quid res publica detrimenti capiat’68 and ‘salus populi
suprema lex esto’.69
In all States which claim to be constitutional there is debate about the proper
limits of State interference with individual rights under these three headings,
‘due process of law’, ‘natural justice’ and ‘emergency powers’, and there is a
very large literature, mainly descriptive and analytical, dealing with matters on
the borderlines between political science, jurisprudence and philosophy. A
personal opinion is that (though it has done something) political science has
not yet doneenough toexplore the political implications of different legal systems,
in different social situations, by its characteristic methods of library study, direct
observation and statistical analysis.