Speech in Syracuse on October 4 and 5, 2024 on the theme of the humanity of law

On October 4, at the invitation of Professor Alessio Lo Giudice, Director of the Faculty of Law of the University of Messina, the Messina Bar Association and the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, Ms. Maud Coudrais spoke at the Colloquium dedicated to the humanity of law in the face of processes of dehumanization.

This initiative was originally born from the simultaneous publication in 2023 of three essays which advocate for resistance against the dehumanising drifts of law and justice : Curare il mondo con Simone Weil (Tommaso Greco - Laterza), Il dramma del giudizio (Alessio lo Giudice - Mimesis), and Riumanizzare il diritto (Maud Coudrais - Mimesis).

Beyond their specificities, these authors share common convictions:

- The human being is the origin, the instrument and the aim of the law (Tommaso Greco).

- Legal practitioners should be women and men of good will who are committed to facing complexity, difficulty and suffering without looking away, and to resolve conflicts without fuelling or minimising them.

- Law has value only in terms of its social utility.

- Reflection on the law is of interest only to the extent that it seeks to account for reality, by resisting the temptation of simplification, sectarianism, and the excess of abstraction.

-The intelligence of law rests on the human conscience. Human and legal intelligence is not reducible to reason, logic, or quantifiable data. It also involves sensitivity, ethical capacity.

-Techniques, whatever they may be, are never neutral. In turn, they profoundly modify our humanity and the perception we have of it.

-Recognizing the humanity of the law implies accepting our fallibility as jurists.

- It is recognizing the value of our vulnerability, our incompleteness, our interdependence as subjects of law.

-It is putting the relationship back at the center of the legal experience.