The government of judges
Reading “the government of judges” by Sabino Cassese. And not only. Michael the Great's Notepad
Sabino Cassese wrote that reforming justice in Italy is difficult because there is no longer the separation of powers. The government has become legislator. Parliament has become administrator. The judges exercise administrative functions, occupying the serving offices of the CSM and the Ministry of Justice, and the legislative function with their presence in the ministerial cabinets. The millions of pending cases show that there is a demand for justice that is not being satisfied. This is reflected in the rapidly decreasing confidence of the population in the judiciary, as measured by polls. If the judiciary does not quickly manage to eliminate the backlog, promptly responding to the demand of those who have turned to the judges, the entire body of the judiciary will end up completely losing the trust that the community must have in justice. Justice that arrives late is not justice. And a justice that loses the trust of citizens risks not being so ("The government of judges, Laterza, 2022).
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In 1816 Giulio Beccaria, Cesare's son, set up an entire room in the Milanese palace in Via Brera to house his father's manuscripts. As the doors above the entrances to the room, he commissioned four tempera canvases from an unknown painter. While the last two are dedicated to the university economics lectures held by Beccaria from 1769 to 1772, the other two illustrate the most memorable event of his life: the drafting of the various drafts “Dei delitti e delle pene” (1765), the work that had given him international fame. The first canvas depicts the moment before writing: that of civil inspiration. Justice, veiled and in shackles, with a heartbroken expression, is presented by a winged Genius to Caesar. The latter, sitting on the desk, turns his shoulders to look towards them. The spectator understands that he is raising his voice to restore dignity to justice. In the image of the second canvas he is instead seen intent on writing his masterpiece. Minerva, that is, the light of reason, dictates it to him.
In the neoclassical grace of the first canvas, the sad and bowed face of Justice is striking. Her hands are tied: she is helpless, enslaved. His condition almost seems to allude to the triumph of injustice. The objects at the feet of his dejected figure are also striking: a log, on which the executioner carries out the decapitation; and a sword, an iconic attribute of Justice together with the blindfold and the scales. What meaning does the presence of these objects have? The idea of the painter or, more probably of the client, is that Justice is afflicted and helpless because it is entrusted with the bloody office of cutting off the heads of the condemned. The sword does not appear in the canvas as an attribute of Justice, but rather as its negation. Justice – authentic justice – appears with the features of meekness: it is a disarmed figure. Which, however, does not resolve his relationship with violence.
Contrasting himself with the eulogy of the “potestas gladii”, Beccaria fully perceives the inexorable and tragic nature of that relationship: interpreter of a new humanistic sensitivity, he arrives at his own painful awareness. In traditional representation, the sword was the shining emblem of justice that punishes wickedness. It is against this mystifying ideology that Beccaria rises up. Of course, criminal violence serves to combat the violence of those who commit crimes: but violence remains. This is why the figure of Justice is dramatic: not being able to renounce violence, he must constantly strive to make the minimum necessary use of it. Ultimately, it is precisely this concept of the "necessary minimum", both a stylistic feature and a philosophical core of the "Crimes", one of Beccaria's most precious legacies for affirming a guaranteeist culture of criminal law. Unfortunately, the political conditions for the Italian Parliament to take a decisive step forward on this path do not yet appear to exist. If the future is in the womb of Jupiter, all that remains is to hope for more benign astral conjunctions.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-governo-dei-giudici/ on Sat, 27 Apr 2024 05:30:05 +0000.