central and peripheral courts public governance ensures that, marginalisation notwithstanding, some ground has been recovered for lawyers as professional experts on human rights. Through human rights, lawyers meet the need to provide justice in today’s public policies.42 Legal historians have the task to remind present-day lawyers and policymakers that Justice has always been an essential component of public governance in our Western tradition. Formerly, the monarch as a sovereign could be seen as a “fountain of justice”, but that sovereign would still rely on the expertise of lawyers as professionals trained in thears boni et aequi in order to work out his policies. The new sovereign, the people in Western democracies, may still have some use for that expertise, particularly by ensuring that the decisions of its representatives are duly informed by human rights issues. If lawyers want to recover the whole field of public governance, however, they will have to incorporate expertise of social sciences in their legal methods. The long-term history of Western public governance – including the governance of courts – shows that the concept of a strict and exclusive hierarchy subordinated to a single central authority has only been a passing attempt at “rationalising” governance. Before, and since the nineteenth century, the picture of public governance – including the administration of justice – shows a much more variegated landscape of institutions based on a large degree of self-rule by different types of interest groups. Today, 42 At the same time, there is a growing risk that the field of human rights becomes trivialised, partly because of a tendency among many lawyers to refer routinely to human rights as if they were positive law arguments which are part and parcel of the advocate’s standard toolkit, with perhaps for the time being a more potent effect. On the other hand, lawyers also often tend to place all human rights and their applications on the same level of authority, as if principles which (e.g.) are primarily intended to strengthen the rule of law, and those which protect directly core features of individual human dignity, were all eiusdem generis. The ambivalence in today’s developments of human rights is somewhat reminiscent of the position in the past of other complexes of higher norms, such as divine law and natural law, which became partly encapsulated in a system and hierarchy of positive law and to such extent lost their normative value beyond and above the law. 50 Conclusion
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