Public lawyer is not a product in a free market. He is neither a star nor lobbyist, he does not devote time to the adulation of authority. It does not go to meetings or subscribes to acts of conflicts of interest. Not only because it refuses the free of free flattery, but because it understands and respects. You know that the problem does not disappear when promiscuity normalizes.
Public jurist does not accept to sell legal opinion from which he disagrees, does not offer legal advice for the end of democracy and is not involved in against the dignity of the profession. It does not accept offer to change sides and does not negotiate political or monetary values.
It understands that elaborating legal argument requires both intellectual fiber and moral independence. You know that the private legal profession needs to face the unavoidable tension between the particular interest in fees and the constitutional democracy and the public interest. And that the state legal career obeys ceilings, not only ethical, but remuneration.
The public jurist, finally, practices censored and discouraged virtues in the age of lobbyist law and the Rentist and nepotist magistocracy in the light of day.
He turned 100 and receives tribute from the USP Law School. Your biography is known. He worked in the field, was baker and tailor. He made a supplement and graduated at the age of 32 at this college where he was later a full professor. He was a state prosecutor and secretary of public security in São Paulo.
Candidate for the Constituent Congress, but without money for the campaign, did not be elected. “A great businessman offered me money and I refused.” Still, he was consecrated as a legal brain of 1988 for contributing to his essay as a legal advisor to Mario Covas, and for educating, through his books, generations of jurists in the interpretation of this text.
It is proud to have helped Mario Covas build the “rare phenomenon” of a “reasonably progressive constitution” in the face of conservative hegemony, the product of a process that, despite everything, could not “completely conceal the popular interest.”
This popular interest has translated into the prediction of social and labor rights, the duty to reduce inequalities, promote the social function of property and protect indigenous territorial rights.
To those who ask for a “lean” constitution, he replies: “They want to leave social rights, they do not want to leave the right to property. They want the right to health, the right to the environment, the right to the environment. If you take it all too lean.
But José Afonso deserves to be celebrated not only by the exemplary biography of public jurist. It offers us, above all, a symbol of integrity in a miserably degraded profession.
The legal profession that is unleashed under the defense of clients or undifferently particular and corporate interests does not find in the life of José Afonso da Silva comfort to conscience.
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