Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
On contempt of court and free speech
The freedom to debate the conduct of public affairs by the judiciary does not mean that attacks, however scurrilous, can with impunity be made on the judiciary as an institution or on individual judicial officers. A clear line cannot be drawn between acceptable criticism of the judiciary as an institution, and of its individual members, on the one side and on the other side statements that are downright harmful to the public interest by undermining the legitimacy of the judicial process as such. But the ultimate objective remains: courts must be able to attend to the proper administration of justice and — in South Africa possibly more importantly — they must be seen and accepted by the public to be doing so. Without the confidence of the people, courts cannot perform their adjudicative role, nor fulfil their therapeutic and prophylactic purpose.
