Constitutional principle

  ► Full reference : M.-A. Frison-Roche, "Fiction🎬The talks in the Town  : what can a law professor do about it?", article from the Newsletter Law & Art, December 2025. - 🎬Watch the trailer - ► Summary of this article : This 1942 film seems to have left little trace. However, the main character, an innocent man whom the villain manipulates into being designated as the culprit by the small town's population, leading him to behave like a guilty person, is played by Cary Grant. This film inspired lawyers even more. And even more so law professors, because it was a law professor, the dean of Harvard Law School, who saved the innocent man who had been caught in the trap. And even more so today, since it was by playing on rumours, by creating them from the outset, in what we would call disinformation, that the powerful villain intended to win and, in the process, become mayor of the town, after escaping bankruptcy by setting fire to his own factory, a crime he blames on the innocent man thrown to the wolves of public opinion as citizens gather in the square. It's almost as if we were there… - 🔓read the article below⤵️ - 🌐Follow Marie-Anne Frison-Roche on LinkedIn 🌐follow Marie-Anne Frison-Roche on Instagram 🌐Subscribe to the Newsletter MAFR Regulation, Compliance, Law 🌐Subscribe to the video newsletter MAFR Overhang 🌐Subscribe to the Newsletter MaFR Law & Art

►   This working document was intended to serve as a support for a conference pronounced in French in the conference Droit et Ethique ( Law & Ethics) of May 31, 2018 in a symposium organized by the Court of Cassation and the Association Française de Philosophie du Droit.  French Association of Philosophy of Law on the general theme Law & Ethics. See a general presentation of this conference.  Rather, it has served as a support for the article to be published in the Archives de Philosophie du Droit (APD). This article is written in French.    ►   Summary: It is through the Law that the human being has acquired a unity in the West (I). What religion could have done, the Law also did by posing on each human being the indetachable notion of him of "person" (I.A). But this is what is challenged today, not the personality and the power that the human being has to express his freedom but the unity that implies in the disposition that we have of ourselves in repelling the desire that others have always had to dispose of us. Current law tends to "pulverize" human beings into data and transform into neutral legal services what was considered before as the devouring of others. The legal concept of "consent", ceasing to be proof of a free will but becoming an autonomous concept, would suffice (I.B.). To prevent the reigning of the "law of desires", which merely reflects the adjustment of forces, we must demand here and now the ethical sovereignty of Law, because Law can not be just just be just the interests adjustment (II). We can form this request if we do not want to live in an a-moral universe (II.A), if we see that the unity of the person is the legal invention that protects the weak human being (II.B.). If we admit this imperative, then we must finally ask who in the legal system will express and impose it, especially the legislator or the judge, because we seem to have lost the ability to recall this principle of the Person on which the West was so centered. But the principles that are no longer said disappear. There would then remain only the case-by-case adjustment of interests between human beings in the world field of particular forces. At this yardstick, Law would be more than a technique of securisation of particular adjustments. Law would be reduced at that and would have lost its link with Ethics. (II.C). .