On Thursday, May 18, 2023, we invite you to the JP2 Lecture, which will be given by Rev. Franciszek Longchamps de Bérier, Professor of Law at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Lawyers are specially trained in providing legal services. They are necessarily aware that the regulations that the law has recourse to are in fact only tools, and that the law is actually designed to promote certain values and it is these values which find their expression in the law. It was pointedly noted in 1991 that, “as history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly-disguised totalitarianism”. The experience of the enormous change in political systems which took place in late twentieth-century Europe led the author of this observation to further comment: “Authentic democracy is possible only in a state ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person”. The first part of this last citation is best known and often repeated. It is the second, however, that touches the main problem of our times, i.e. anthropology. How should one respect human beings as bearers of rights? Is there any correct anthropology, the only correct anthropology to be used as a basis for law?
