What is it with you lawyers (and judges and anybody involved in law) that I hardly ever understand what you are talking about? I remember having classes in private law at university. I didn’t get one single sentence you said. I remember having dinner with lawyer friends of my lawyer girlfriend. I didn’t get a single sentence you said. What is it with you? You who define half my life by rules?
This was the background when I went to a lunchtime talk yesterday of the Austrian European Court of Justice judge Maria Berger. Berger was talking about “Die Rechtsprechung des EuGH zur Grundrechtecharta”. She introduced herself with two stories about God’s own country Switzerland. As a student Berger attended the Landsgemeinde in the Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden where the men (and the men only) refused to provide the women with their fundamental right to vote several times.
Those women of Appenzell Innerrhoden finally got their right by a ruling of the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland in 1990 (so much about the absolut supremacy of democracy over law as some people claim).
It was one year later when Berger was again in Switzerland witnessing the Swiss popular vote on the European Economic Area.
The Swiss public voted it down, to the surprise of the political and economical establishment. The Njet had far reaching consequences. Among them was the rise of right-wing populist Christoph Blocher who should shape Swiss politics for the following 20 years until this very day.
The judge seemed to be ironic enough to make her talk enjoyable. I thought it would be my law day. I actually followed Berger in her discussion attentively, and I enjoyed it to my own surprise, but if you would ask me hard questions about the content I couldn’t answer them. You could blame the fact that the European Court of Justice is from a Swiss perspective quasi non-existent. You could blame the fact that law Sprech is hard to follow. But in the end I had to blame myself. The European Court of Justice will define my life as much as the Supreme Court of Switzerland does. And anything that affects your life so much as law should be of interest to me, to you.