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Lustration as a Problem of the Social Basis of Constitutionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Arthur L. Stinchcornbe
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Abstract

One part of building a new constitution after wars, revolutions, civil wars, or dramatic regime changes is to draw a cultural boundary in time, declaring various aspects of the old regime illegitimate and various legalities and constitutional principles of the new regime legitimate. One part of that process, in turn, is to decide how the new regime should treat the guilt of individuals for terror, collaboration, betrayal of information to the regime, and the like. This essay argues that such lustration processes should be a very minor part of the definition of the meaning of the pat, and even less of a part of building social supports under the new constitution. It also assesses the contributions on lustration in this issue in light of this view of what place lustration should play in the construction of democratic constitutions after authoritarian regimes.

Type
Symposium: Law and Lustration: Righting the Wrongs of the Past
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 245 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1995 

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References

1 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (rev. & enl. ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1977) (originally published in the New Yorker and in a book published by Viking Press in 1963).Google Scholar

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23 Wexler's argument is that penalties that do not do any good except to symbolize the awfulness of the crime are justified. This seems to me morally right, though one wants to be careful that symbols do not thereby become terrorist rather than democratic. But social scientists are not good advisors on how to construct symbols that resist corruption.Google Scholar

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