England's dreaming equity, trust and conscience - alastairhudson.com

law device. This explanation of equity is not sufficient. It is not fit for purpose in ademocratic age. In the immortal words of John Lydon: “There’s no future inEngland’s dreaming”.Equal access to justice‘Law is the servant of freedom; but freedom without equality is just a word.’The connection between “equity” as understood in the social sciences generally and“equity” as understood by property law specifically, requires that equity is availableas a technique across the whole of English law. In my book Towards a just society Iconsider how a workable principle of “equality of access” is the keystone for leftwingpoliticians; and that it is the sword which can splice the Gordian knot whichbinds debate over the meaning of “equality” in socialist thought. Equal access tojustice should be the core principle of a socialist policy on access to justice and tocitizens’ rights.Working in the law school at QM, there are problems with seeing order and certainty.If one works in the law school on the Mile End Road you have a selection of view. Myown is east-facing and is a view of the west wall of the Arts building. If you have awest-facing view then you can see the east wall of the maintenance building and thecar parts shop. If you have a north-facing view then all you can see is the graveyard.If you have a south-facing view then you are faced with the Mile End Road,Limehouse and Canary Wharf. In the distance are the clearest symbols of London’saspirations as a financial centre with those Citibank and other towers huddled aroundCanary Wharf, processing trillions and trillions of dollars every day. Right in front ofyou, however, is the Ocean Estate opposite the college on the Mile End Road with(so legend has it) the highest infant mortality rate in Europe. For a lawyer at QueenMary then there is confronting you the two poles of our society: the bustle of an areawhich has been for centuries the first point of entry for immigrant communities whichare currently experienced tuberculosis and which minute-by-minute are serenaded bythe sirens of the emergency services, and the headquarters of the richestcorporations operating in Europe: one in the shadow of the other. This creates amoral challenge to us in the way in which we choose to think about law and to interactwith that community.It is not reasonable to expect that law will conform to predictable patterns. Why arewe so determined to be taxonomically predictable when everyone in this room isirrational about so many other areas of their lives? For example, we all know that eachnew day begins by the sun coming up. Everyone in this room agrees with thatstatement. Only the sun does not rise in the morning. The sun stays in exactly thesame place. Instead the Earth revolves and orbits around the sun. Yet we talkconstantly in the language of these fictions. We need them.And it’s because we’re human.If we are going to accept that law is a human creation and if we are going to value theindividual significance of each human being, then we must continue to think aboutthat law as containing equity in the sense I have discussed it. We must think of law as36www.alastairhudson.com | © professor alastair hudson