Prof. Olga Nickole Kuyan
1 Sept 2021
#FollowingLautsiCase
Studio Legale Lauricella Takes Law Seriously.
We Vote for Mindful Lawyers/Judges, becoming Political Actors.
For Unity of Diversity, Inclusion, Sustainability.
This year we celebrate Lautsi case, pronounced 10 years ago.
We proceed from a deep unifying effect between the peoples from various countries, the Crucifix case has produced. The Lautsi case bears witness that people's unity needs high values and the Christianity remains at the heart.
Today we go forward. We, the leading Italian Law Firm, call for sharing the goal of demystifying the discipline of law.
We share the opinion that freedom of thought, conscience and religion should be understood in terms of individual human rights, not minority rights and we are sure, this freedom should include mindfulness.
Mindfulness could have a unifying effect between various lawyers and professionals.
The Studio Legale Diffuso could be the unifying platform for various lawyers and professionals, the platform with high value including, with high value of rebirthing of the territory, its roots and its sky, its culture, traditions, history and its people. The Studio Legale Diffuso is to support local small and middle-size enterprises (law firms and not only), to give a second life to hamlets and small towns with their peculiarities.
The Studio Legale Diffuso and the Mindfulness are for unity of diversity, inclusion.
We agree that in the field of law and thought, conscience, religion European Court of Human Rights acts as a unique laboratory of concepts and tools (M.Ventura). But we basically disagree with the argument that judicial discretion/legal creativity should play a role only rarely, but that, in most cases, the application of law should be “fairly straightforward” (De Franciscis, Maria Elisabetta/Rosella Zannini).
We claim that the application of law is complex, never straightforward because judicial/legal arguments and judicial/legal methods cannot deliver unambiguous decisions. That is why we are (also) interested in the question of how politics influences jurisprudence and vice versa.
Could mindfulness be a practice lawyers/judges apply to become influential political actors? - we ask and answer Yes.
We consider that courts and legal firms are political actors and call for sharing the goal of demystifying the discipline of law. We take law seriously.
Once one takes law seriously, the question arises of whether we can conceptualize judicial discretion/legal creativity as a choice between political or judicial/legal action.
In our monograph on Judicial Discretion (2005), we emphasized that judicial discretion always involves political decisions.
We all know, politics sucks. It is largely a playground for (individual and national) egos that are fixated on power and self-advantage. The obvious failure of ordinary political/judicial/legal thinking to create a world of peace and justice should suggest to us that we look further, deeper, for guides to action.
We envision politics as a humanitarian enterprise focused on the betterment and upliftment of all human societies. We vote for mindful judges/lawyers becoming influential political actors. We seek to shed light on how to humanize legal firms/courts/politics and--dare we hope-- lawyers, judges and politicians. Delightfully, even the mafia makes sense.
How can wisdom not guide us in that most human of activities called 'conflict resolution'?
We go into Mindful Politics, doing just that, gently pushing the readers to think beyond religion, drawing upon ancient wisdom to cope with the crisis, ecology catastrophe, human rights protection missing, poverty, violence and insecurity of our time, giving the readers inspiration and hope.
Just imagine mindful politicians, lawyers, judges! Immagine them united by some high value! That is exactly what we are doing through the Mindfulness at the Studio Legale Diffuso.
We intend to offer what has been missing from so much progressive theory and practice: ways of bringing peace right into the heart of a lawyer/judge/politician and into the heat of the struggle. Dharma and legal professionals. It's a marriage made at the Studio Legale Lauricella.
Mindful Politics has gathered the big names-- ex UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, Vl.Solovjev, Ivan Ilyin, Teilhard de Chardin, William A Tiller, Carlo Rovelli, Thich Nhat Hanh, even the Dalai Lama himself--around an ancient idea whose time is more relevant than ever: that the enlightened governance of a society transcend issues of gender, class, race.
Our Mindful Studio Legale Diffuso offers a first hint of what the consummation between Buddhadharma and global mindful politics of lawyers might look like - and how to get there.
1. Our legal resolutions are shaped and channeled by our obligation to deliver legal services resting on a legal basis. We neither glorify nor deny the role of law. We assume that the development of the Mindful Studio Legale Diffuso is a process heavily influenced by politics. If Alec Stone (Stone, Alec, 1992) is right in claiming that Europe suffers from a tradition of the separation of law and politics, our experience demystifies this is important.
2. Our development and changes are a political process of political interest intermediation, an interaction.
3. We always apply the laws creatively.
Our core topic is the importance of legal ideas and legal doctrine for legal activity, and the inclusion of mindfulness in legal ideas and legal doctrine.
We assume that legal ideology, mindfulness including, shapes not only the interactions but also the preferences of the judges/lawyers and of society at large.
In this perspective, judges/lawyers shape politics through the development of legal doctrine, legal ideas and through the mindfulness in law, too. The process of shaping legal doctrine, legal ideas from new sources unfolds step by step over long periods of time.
We would agree with Volcansek that research on European courts should look more closely at the politics of judicial action. We go forward: we look at the reality created by our mindfulness and the Studio Legale Diffuso; we look at the politics of our different legal practices, mindfulness and Studio Legale Diffuso including.
This approach has following advantages, especially concerning high values we live at the Studio Legale Diffuso:
- A priori, political actors try to influence the development of legal concepts and tools and we evaluate that only mindful politics could influence our mindfulness.
- Our legal choice does not occur out of nowhere, but responds to a legal discourse unfolding over a longer time period – months or years. In most legal issues the universe of competing legal concepts/legal ideas is obvious before a lawyer makes a choice, and he/she merely picks one of them, perhaps with some modifications (e.g. paragraph 56 of the decision demonstrates that the concept of neutrality applied by ECtHR in the Lautsi v Italy case represents a transposition of the French version of strong secularism).
This means that political interests have to be translated into legal language in order to become successful. But readers could have some questions regarding the thoughts, ideas, concepts and translations emerged via mindfulness, for example: how are they linked to political interests, which intellectual and material resources are used to help them become the dominant norm, to what extent are they selected by a lawyer?
- Our mindfulness meets science.
- Methodologically, we apply Design Thinking, Complexity, Mindfulness.
- For the implementation we have Golden Hours and the Series on Mindfulness.
- Effectively we apply the Meditation Practice.
- As a space-filling we use the Studio Legale Diffusso.
- We learn from Mediterranean Style of Life, style of legal life including.
Our Initiatives present the following main aspects of our contemporary research of the future: the future is complex, made of granules, particells and its various images are interactions. Future is the interrelations which we create today. We prove the necessity of studying the future to correct the present by creating and transforming legal ideas, legal practices and value orientations through Studio Legale Diffuso and Mindfulness in Law.
The Studio Legale Diffuso and the Mindfulness are for sustainability.
May our perspectives and practices inspire, inform and nurture the next generation of political leaders, judges, lawyers, professionals --since we are all vital living 'cells' in the body of this one world--as we ponder and hopefully contribute in ways little and big to the health of the body-politic, the body-judiciary, the body-lawyer, the body-professional which is nothing less now than the health of not just the nation but the whole world.
We want to make a contribution on how to skillfully address the current state of political affairs, judicial/legal politics. We don’t pretend to give all the Earth needs but we give our small part.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.