Dura lex, sed lex

DURA LEX, SED LEX: THE LAW IS HARSH BUT IT’S THE LAW. DISCUSS.

The law is the foundation of the society as we know it nowadays. It guarantees the social   co-existence because everyone has to obey the same law and no one is above. The fact that law existed long before Jesus Christ shows us that human beings need parent structure in society. The law has to be harsh otherwise nobody would stick to it and crime rate would be significantly higher. Without the executive organ, there would be articles without signification because society would be unable to control the people. In the following, we will discuss, if Domitius Ulpianus is right when he says: dura lex, sed lex.

First of all, even if the law is harsh, there is a lot of injustice in the world. Injustice means that somebody doesn’t comply with the law. It is necessary to be able to estimate the law with regard to the criteria, so that an action can be unjust. In absence of the law, we would have no criteria to estimate the actions that people commit. However, it is possible that a fair law gives rise to unfair applications of the law. For example, a person, who was several times arrested because of speeding, will lose half of his points on the driver’s license. As well as a person who once hits a child who crossed the street without looking, is similarly punished, even if it wasn’t his fault.

Moreover, the legal system shows a weak point because sometimes files are not analysed or treated in a correct way. Due to this, some penalties of the delinquents are not equivalent to the committed crimes. Consequently, some delinquents are badly judged according to their crimes and their sorrow is heavy, whereas other delinquents committed cruel crimes and their sorrow is less severe. Therefore, there are some people who are judged too harsh for their acts and others not harsh enough. We can find an example for this in Luxembourg, a driver, in state of big drunkenness, killed a police woman and his punishment is only 5 years of prison. He killed someone and got a very short prison state in comparison to other people that committed similar crimes. On the other hand a drug dealer got also 5 years for selling cannabis and cocaine, which is a very big prison state in comparison to the fact, that a drunken man got the same for taking someone’s life away.

Besides, even if the legal system is severely controlled, corruption remains an elevated problem in our society. The judicial corruption indicates an influence on the impartiality of the judicial process; this is true for every actor of this system. Furthermore, a certain form of corruption manipulates the legal system to lead to an unjust decision. Due to the extortion of money between the officers of justice, corruption does not stop. Most of them accept bribes to delay or accelerate a process of appeal or simply to conduct a process in a desirable direction. For example, in October 2015, a Luxembourgish judge has been accused to take money for his illegal personal gain and, in return, lead processes in a favourable direction for the generous donors.

In the second part of the essay, we will encounter some arguments that underline the message of the statement “dura lex, sed lex”.

First and foremost, if the law would not exist, there would be no maintenance of social order. The world would be only chaos and anarchy, because people would not show respect towards each other. Moreover, people would do what they want, without thinking about the consequences of their actions for the fellow human beings. For this reason, law is inevitable to maintain the peace and harmony in society. Because it gives the basic notion of what is right and what is false, so that the people living there are able to discern good and evil. For example, in some of the countries of the Middle East, we notice an absence of the strict maintenance of social order. Due to this, armed conflicts and wars are more likely to appear, when this leading structure of society and social order are partly missing or completely absent.

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