Lex Jurist State - An Experimental State

Published: August 18, 2022

By: Miszy G. Antega (4th Year Political Science Student)

The law is essential for a society because it serves as a norm of conduct for citizens. It will also provide proper guidelines and order for all citizens' behavior and sustain the equity of the three branches of the government. It keeps society running. Without the law, there would be turmoil, and it would be survival of the fittest and all man for himself. It will not an ideal lifestyle for the most part.

Moreover, the legal system reflects all the energy of life within any society. The law has the intricate vitality of a living organism. It is a social science characterized by movement and adaptation. Rules are neither created nor applied in a vacuum; on the other hand, they are created and used time and again for a purpose. Rules move us in a specific direction that we assume is good or prohibit movement in a direction that we believe is bad.

However, ignorance is widely considered a curse that prevents human progress and social injustice. When a State is run by the ignorant, it will fail. If the State fails, so do the villages, the family, and the entire society. No wonder then that "ignorance" is considered something negative. Societies all over the planet invest heavily in the fight against ignorance, i.e., in schools and education, in the transfer of knowledge. Moreover, that has worked reasonably well to create an even better educated population.

In this paper, I will argue that an ideal State must be governed only by court judges and lawyers, in which case they are the only ones eligible to run for public office. Law is the foundation of society; therefore, the experts in law, such as court judges and lawyers, must be the ones to rule the State.

Society is a "web-relationship," and social change is defined as a shift in the social relationships system, where a social relationship is defined by social processes, social interactions, and social organizations. Thus, "social change" is used to indicate desirable variations in social institutions, social processes, and social organization. It includes alterations in the structure and functions of society. The analysis of the role of law vis-à-vis social change directs us to distinguish between the direct and indirect aspects of the role of law.

Meanwhile, law schools the world over claim to instruct their students on how to "think like a lawyer." Learning a bunch of legal rules is not the primary goal of studying law; law schools insist that there are far more rules in law than can be taught in three years of legal education. Besides, many of the legal rules that can be learned in law school might have been changed by the time the students enter legal practice. It is true that knowing some legal rules and acquiring the skills of lawyering are essential to success in law and to achieving social justice.

Furthermore, it is also true that some of this knowledge is usefully gained in law school. Nevertheless, what distinguishes lawyers from other sorts of people is their mastery of an array of talents in argument and decision-making that are often collectively described as legal reasoning. So, albeit law schools do teach some legal rules and some practical professional skills, they also maintain that their most important mission is to train students in the arts of legal argument, judicial decision-making, and legal reasoning.

What is a Lex Juris State?

A Lex Juris State is a State wherein it is guided by legal reasoning. According to Luenendonk (2016), legal reasoning is a method of thought and argument used by lawyers and judges when applying legal rules to specific interactions among legal persons. The court provides an analysis of its legal ruling here, and it assists other courts, lawyers, and judges in applying and following the ruling in subsequent proceedings.

The nature of man is centered on its interest. A man is only ignorant if he is uninterested in such a field, and this shows a lack of enthusiasm for doing and studying such. The law is the foundation of the government. The law allows the authorities to ensure that citizens will cooperate and regulate their activities in accordance with the law. However, one cannot just let anyone run a public office if their ignorance of society's pertinent laws is apparent. One must be genuinely interested in the law; hence, one must be an expert in it.

Law schools aim to teach their students how to think differently from ordinary people and from members of other professions. Lord Coke sustained as long ago as 1628 that there was an "artificial" reason for the law, which is a distinction between pure rationality and the particular methods of the law, and particularly of judges. The Lex Jurist State will give primacy to education equally to all genders and social status.

• At the age of 6–10, a child will be taught about their basic human rights in society and other fundamental subjects.

• At the age of 10-17, a teen will be taught in a broader scope on its rights in the society and other fundamental subjects in junior to senior high.

• At the age of 17–22, he/she will take up any four-year course with different specializations but still consider the teaching of laws as an essential part of the curriculum.

• At the age of 22–35, the excellent one who aspires to become a lawyer and serve the public as a public officer will undergo many examinations; the one who passes will be successfully admitted to a law school to specialize in the law.

• One will take the Bar Exam to obtain a license to become a lawyer.

• After passing the Bar Exam, legal practice is a must before running as a public official.

The Lex Jurist State adopted the right to suffrage of the citizen to whom at least was an undergrad, of course of different specialization. Suffrage was the most significant power of the individual to control and be part of society. The decision must be entirely made by an educated person who is literate enough to know that a single vote will bear fruit in the future. Suffrage is a grant to those well-educated for the betterment of society. All citizens will have an opportunity to elect since education will be free and be given primacy for all kinds of social status, especially for the poor, as well as for the different races and genders. The purpose of giving primary consideration, primarily to educate the less fortunate, is that, since the lawyers will rule the State, it would be vulnerable to oppressing those who do not have the chance to study. Thus, the purpose of the State providing it is to protect their sovereignty against competent leaders. Also, discrimination will be hard to find since education will be offered equally to different races and genders.

The State also adopted the separation of powers where there is an executive who implements the law, a legislative who makes the law, and a judiciary who interprets the law, and other lower government offices for whom lawyers and judges are the only ones who are eligible to run for public office. The following are the qualifications of a public officer in Lex Juris State:

• A natural-born citizen of the state who is lawyer and Judge

• Must be at least five years of legal practice in the state.

Additionally, The Lex Jurist State adopted the idea of Weber in which it provided ten necessities addressing "how individual officials are appointed and work." The administrative staff is under the highest authority for legal authority in a bureaucratic administrative style.

1. Public officials are personally free and subject to authority only concerning their impersonal official obligations.

2. They are organized clearly into a defined hierarchy of offices.

3. Each office has a defined sphere of competence in the legal sense.

4. The office has a free contractual relationship or free selection.

5. Candidates are selected based on technical qualifications.

6. They are remunerated by fixed salaries in money, for the most part, with a right to pensions.

7. The office will be the sole, or at least primary, occupation of the incumbent.

8. It constitutes a career.

9. The official work is entirely separated from ownership of the means of administration and without the appropriation of its position.

10. A public official is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office.

The rest of the citizens will do their thing in society according to their specialization. The State will also have a constitution that the public officer must follow, and citizens must obey the public officer. The authorities will protect everyone's life, property, and liberty; although liberty will only be protected to a certain extent. If the government fails to fulfill its duty in accordance with the law, the people will have the power to overthrow it.

In conclusion, the law cannot be plausibly seen as a closed system, in the way that games like chess might be. All the chess moves are in the rules of chess, but not all the moves in legal argument and legal decision-making are in the rules of law. The law of necessity depends on many skills other than those explicitly understood to be legal. However, the law is inevitably and especially subject to the unforeseeable complexity of the human condition. We can, at best, imperfectly foretell the future, just as we remain undecided about what we will do with that future once we get there. As the world continues to throw the unexpected at us, the law will find itself repeatedly forced to go outside of the existing rules to serve the society in which it exists. Law may well contain the resources for its arsenal of argument and decision-making that it needs to adapt to a changing world. However, insofar as that is the case, it is even less likely that the image of a closed system in which existing rules of law—and maybe even the existing practices of legal argumentation—will be an exact picture of what law does and how it does.

The Lex Jurist State is not like Plato's utopia. Thus, we understand that the values of legal reasoning and the Rule of Law may serve important goals in constraining the actions of leaders lacking the benign wisdom of Plato's hypothetical philosopher-kings. Nevertheless, even when we leave Plato's utopia and find ourselves in the real world with real leaders and their real flaws, the same dilemma persists. Legal reasoning, mainly, and the Rule of Law, in general, will often serve as an impediment to wise policies and the sound discretion of enlightened, even if not perfect, leaders.

Reasoning with rules is conceivably the most basic image of what lawyers and judges do. A widespread popular conception is that lawyers argue their cases by appealing to complex rules not understandable by ordinary people and that judges make their decisions by consulting books full of such rules. Having found the right rule, the judge then proceeds to apply it mechanically to the case at hand, and that is the end of the matter. So, although explicitly philosophical treatments of authority rarely surface in legal argument, the fact that authority itself is deeply contested is a looming presence in the operation of the law. Content-independent authority lies at the heart of legal reasoning. Hence, only legal experts, such as lawyers and court judges, should be eligible to run for public office.