►   This working document was intended to serve as a support for a conference pronounced in French in the conference Droit et Ethique ( Law & Ethics) of May 31, 2018 in a symposium organized by the Court of Cassation and the Association Française de Philosophie du Droit.  French Association of Philosophy of Law on the general theme Law & Ethics.

See a general presentation of this conference. 

Rather, it has served as a support for the article to be published in the Archives de Philosophie du Droit (APD). This article is written in French. 

 

►   Summary: It is through the Law that the human being has acquired a unity in the West (I). What religion could have done, the Law also did by posing on each human being the indetachable notion of him of "person" (I.A). But this is what is challenged today, not the personality and the power that the human being has to express his freedom but the unity that implies in the disposition that we have of ourselves in repelling the desire that others have always had to dispose of us. Current law tends to "pulverize" human beings into data and transform into neutral legal services what was considered before as the devouring of others. The legal concept of "consent", ceasing to be proof of a free will but becoming an autonomous concept, would suffice (I.B.).

To prevent the reigning of the "law of desires", which merely reflects the adjustment of forces, we must demand here and now the ethical sovereignty of Law, because Law can not be just just be just the interests adjustment (II). We can form this request if we do not want to live in an a-moral universe (II.A), if we see that the unity of the person is the legal invention that protects the weak human being (II.B.). If we admit this imperative, then we must finally ask who in the legal system will express and impose it, especially the legislator or the judge, because we seem to have lost the ability to recall this principle of the Person on which the West was so centered. But the principles that are no longer said disappear. There would then remain only the case-by-case adjustment of interests between human beings in the world field of particular forces. At this yardstick, Law would be more than a technique of securisation of particular adjustments. Law would be reduced at that and would have lost its link with Ethics. (II.C).

Le cours a trait à la troisième Grande Question du Droit qui porte sur le juge. Il se concentre plus particulièrement sur la fonction politique et sociale de celui-ci, la question plus technique du procès et du jugement faisant l’objet du cours ultérieur. En ce qui concerne la fonction politique et sociale du juge, celui-ci apparaît tout d’abord comme un instrument de rappel à la légalité. En cela, il est un instrument de réalisation de la loi, d’autant plus s’il s’agit d’un juge pénal ou administratif, où l’intérêt général et l’ordre public interviennent. L’autre fonction du juge est de mettre fin au litige entre les personnes, ce qui est l’office traditionnel du juge civil. Mais l’intérêt général est également présent dans le droit privé et l’on cherche aujourd’hui en toute matière à développer les modes alternatifs de règlement des litiges.