Wine - Roger Scruton declares drink and the law are friends
Published 11 April 2005
A quarter-century ago, I learned that drink and the law are friends
People respect the law when the law respects people, which means when it looks kindly on our human failings. Our legislators have lost sight of this truth, and therefore bombard us with edicts telling us what we cannot do, what we cannot think and what we cannot say. We should be wary, therefore, when the political class turns its attention to our drinking habits. The effect will be to boss and blight the institutions - pub, club, wine bar, taverna - that sustain the social life of ordinary people. And when all the oppressive edicts are in place, the problem of drunkenness will be just as great, given that the cause of drunkenness is not the drink but the drunk.
That, in a nutshell, is what I think about the law and alcohol, and other contributors to the New Statesman have taken a similar line. But there is another aspect to the question, which concerns the nature of English law. The common law is neither the product nor the tool of the state, but an impartial witness of social conflict and a vigilant provider of remedies. The English legal profession is, therefore, jealous of its independence and of its right to interpret the law.
You learn to practise the common law through membership of an Inn of Court, and a kind of genial collegiality embraces student, barrister and judge, uniting them in "the common pursuit of true judgement", to borrow a well-known phrase from T S Eliot. So it was, at least in my day, a quarter of a century ago, when I learned that drink and law are not enemies but friends. We were taught by example that the true business of law - which is not to boss people around, but to reconcile their differences - is also the business of drink.
It had to be the right kind of drink, taken in the right frame of mind, in the right company and at the right time of day. In other words, it had to be wine, drunk in a spirit of inquiry, among your natural competitors, during the evening meal. Drink, taken in that way, taught us both to reveal our differences and to overcome them - in other words, to understand both the need for law and its never-ending work of reconciliation.
Dining was therefore an obligatory part of the legal education, and at each dinner a bottle of wine and a half of port were set down between four of us. The judges at their "bench" and the barristers at their table were likewise supplied from the cellars. What a blow was then struck for reconciliation when Muslims and Christians, boozers and puritans, yokels and squires, turned their contrasting and often conflicting eyes to the dwindling bottle in their midst, and discovered both the value of difference and the way to remove its danger.
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