Regarding the rule of law, the following is a piece of what administrative law students learn at university:
"Está pois certa a doutrina de Marcello Caetano, segundo a qual neste ponto têm plenamente razão os positivistas: não importa tanto o que está legislado como o que é executado, isto é, os termos em que os preceitos legislativos são entendidos, acatados e aplicados na prática quotidiana. (...) Se o jurista se limitar a estudar as leis publicadas num país e ainda não revogadas, obtém uma visão incompleta, e porventura deformada, da realidade jurídica".
(Freitas do Amaral, op. cit., p. 143, quoting the founding father of administrative law in the country).
Briefly stated, what the law says does not matter at all. What matters is the will of the people who have the power to apply and interpret the law, regardless of whether they are judges, politicians or bureaucrats. Administrative law students in this country are thus educated to live in an arbitrary, discretionary society where, if they have power, they can do as they wish, regardless of the law. From their early years at university these students, later administrative law experts and scientists, become an enormous burden and a genuine threat to a free society.
It then follows that this is a country where people fear their own public administration, and appropriately so. It is also a country where most people educated in this philosophy of law dream of getting a job in the public sector. For it is there, as public administrators or politicians backed by state power, that they feel perfectly free - that sort of totalitarian freedom which rapaciously includes the capacity to abuse their own fellow citizens.
"Está pois certa a doutrina de Marcello Caetano, segundo a qual neste ponto têm plenamente razão os positivistas: não importa tanto o que está legislado como o que é executado, isto é, os termos em que os preceitos legislativos são entendidos, acatados e aplicados na prática quotidiana. (...) Se o jurista se limitar a estudar as leis publicadas num país e ainda não revogadas, obtém uma visão incompleta, e porventura deformada, da realidade jurídica".
(Freitas do Amaral, op. cit., p. 143, quoting the founding father of administrative law in the country).
Briefly stated, what the law says does not matter at all. What matters is the will of the people who have the power to apply and interpret the law, regardless of whether they are judges, politicians or bureaucrats. Administrative law students in this country are thus educated to live in an arbitrary, discretionary society where, if they have power, they can do as they wish, regardless of the law. From their early years at university these students, later administrative law experts and scientists, become an enormous burden and a genuine threat to a free society.
It then follows that this is a country where people fear their own public administration, and appropriately so. It is also a country where most people educated in this philosophy of law dream of getting a job in the public sector. For it is there, as public administrators or politicians backed by state power, that they feel perfectly free - that sort of totalitarian freedom which rapaciously includes the capacity to abuse their own fellow citizens.
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