LECTURES - College of Social Sciences and International Studies ...

The Lion and the Ox
which privation in the midst of plenty is possible; but that does
not mean that they are obliged to endorse all the consequent
injustices. 59
Lord Reid once observed that people want the law to be two
incompatible things—certain and adaptable. 60 Lord Atkin knew
which was the more important: "Finality is a good thing," he
said, "but justice is a better." 61 1 have suggested in the course of
these lectures that the idea of a free society as a condition of
individual freedom is an integral and still relevant part of our
historical legacy; that law in a free and moral society, while it is
not its job to redistribute power, is concerned centrally with the
abuse of power wherever it resides; and that justice has to be
sought not in some crystalline outcome but as a process of
principled negotiation through law of interests which may be
no less legitimate for want of the status of tabulated rights. It is a
long way, I know, from Sir Alfred Denning's lucid and persuasive
account in the first Hamlyn Lectures of a society and a legal
system which, in spite of occasional problems, had basically got
it right. Half a century on, as it seems to me, we have a lot to be
glad of and a lot to build on, but also much still to worry about
and, with luck and judgment, to resolve.
59 "Mais ou s'arreter, lorsqu'on s'engage dans cette voie d'ajustement a la
marge? Et comment respecter l'egalite, eviter l'arbitraire, echapper a la confusion?"
("But where do you stop once you have started on this path of
marginal adjustment? And how do you maintain equality, avoid arbitrariness
and escape confusion?"): Guy Braibant, "Nouvelles reflexions sur les rapports
du droit et de 1'equite", Revue frangaise d'administration publique, no. 64, p. 691.
In other words, the problem of the hard case is always there.
60 Lord Reid, "The Judge as Law-maker" (1972) 12 J.S.P.T.L. 22.
61 Ras Behari Lai v. King-Emperor (1933) 50 T.L.R. 1.
56