Haven’t we all done it? Arrive at the airport without a book for that longhaul flight – in my case a trip to Japan last month for a Lawasia conference. The book that jumped out at me, once I had passed through Customs, was Thomas Friedman’s latest work, Thank you for Being Late, subtitled ‘An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations’.
Friedman is an op-ed writer for the New York Times. It was a great book to take on a holiday, and an excellent sequel to his 2005 reflection on ‘Globalisation 3.0’ (as he then called it), The World is Flat. At the start of his current book, Friedman recounts some advice he had given to a prospective blog writer, which I think it is best to quote:
“This act of chemistry [the blog] usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture – how they react and don’t – when the big forces impact them.”
These three ingredients, thinking about my own work and study, seem to merge into an exploration of how the rule of law operates as a countervailing force to the exercise of power. As Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford noted in his text, Power (2010), power per se can be good or bad; it depends upon how it is used. Ideally, in my view, the rule of law encourages the beneficial use of power, by providing an objective and independent constraint upon the misuse of power, having regard to the interests of the community and the people which the law serves.
It has often been said that the past is a foreign country, and Friedman highlights how the future may seem equally foreign and daunting to us now. Yet, my reason for optimism is drawn from the work of James Dowling, a barrister and law reporter, who left the familiarity of the old world in London in 1828, to become a judge, and subsequently the second Chief Justice, of New South Wales in 1837.
Dowling CJ, his fellow judges and the early colonial lawyers well understood that their task was to fashion the law of England to meet the needs of an emerging free society in Australia, as the colony transitioned from the command and control environment of its penal origins, to that of a free market economy.
The challenges we face today in commercial and international law, are no less daunting than those faced by our early colonial forebears, in adapting our traditional sources and concepts of law to our interconnected, global world that Friedman calls the ‘Age of Acceleration’. I will shortly be addressing some of these issues, and the solutions being devised by UNCITRAL, in an upcoming series of United Nations Day lectures that will be presented around Australia, which I will also be the subject of future posts.
Through this blog I hope to explore the ideas of law, power and community further, and would welcome your comments, thoughts and feedback as the blog evolves. Also, just in case you were wondering, the reason Friedman thanked his unnamed colleague for being late, was because it gave him a few unscheduled moments for thought and reflection, which can be a valuable gift as we are forever racing from point A to point B – something I realised when I sat back to open the book as the plane lifted off the runway bound for Tokyo.
TDC
15 October 2017