Milan Jazbec Ambassador, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia; Professor of Diplomacy, University of Ljubljana and the New University in Kranj in Slovenia
O.K. Corral 140 years later: Between frontier violence and the emerging rule of law First published on the IFIMES1 website, October 2021 It was 140 years ago today that Wyatt Earp took his group to fight the outlaws of the Clanton gang. It was a bright, windy, and chilly day of 26 October 1881 that – without its actors being exactly aware of it – paved the way for the rule of law to become an irreversible fact. Justice, rule of law, and the European integration process There is a telling, a primary and basic articulation from the Bible, of what we understand today as the rule of law: ‘treat others as you want to be treated’. The ancient Roman law puts this more precisely and it is still relevant nowadays, both among lawyers and among societies: let there be justice so that the world will not collapse (as part of habeas corpus). The French Revolution of 1789 defined it with the timeless slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, and with the French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. The Magna Carta Libertatum from the year 12152 (as the legal and political foundation), as well as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights from 1948 (as a political and policy derivate) confirmed it. One could find numerous, more or less exact principles and anchors to understand, as well as to comprehend justice. People want justice to rule their lives; they want everybody to be just and fair, doing nothing on the account of others. Generally speaking, this originates from the eternal question of good and bad, and how to provide the former and to prevent the latter. Closely related to this is the issue of honour and duty as well: Doc Holliday, a controversial figure of the Western frontier, ‘saw what he did on the street fight and afterwards as a duty’, since ‘honor mattered to him at a level few realized’; he believed ‘that he was doing something right and good’.3 Justice could be defined as the result of a process through which formal authorities try to find out or to judge fairly what is right and what is wrong, and to punish those who do not stick to the defined rules or who disrespect and disobey them. Commonly, the popular notions of justice and fairness overlap with the formal expression and the codified legal systems. Therefore, law must be just and fair, doing and enabling to do right.
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