Law and lawyers in Maltese proverbs

Abstract

People everywhere have a poor idea of human justice and, naturally, distrust advocates and the Law Courts. This distrust of human justice is more pronounced among the illiterate and semi-illiterate communities who have to rely on the counsel or expensive patronage of better off people, especially lawyers. This distrust of human justice and the Law Courts is pithily expressed in the sayings ll-ligi saret għall-banavolja or brikkun (prov. 26); 'k tidhol il-Qorti int tiekol sardina u l-avukat jiekol gallina ( prov. 47), and aħjar tiswija ħażina minn sentenza tajba (prov. 51). Of the 55 M. proverbs included in this section, which is taken from my unpublished work A Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs, not one extols the virtue of the Law or the majesty of Justice. The people's mind is more full of the fear of injustice than of confidence in justice; is more sensitive to the relativity and unreliability of human judgement than to the majesty of the Law as an expression. of the Roman legal maxim suum cuique dare.