On the other side of adverse reliance is the power source, often given special liberties because offering special services to society, but which is thus also required to balance its prerogatives with obligations that protect the public from unnecessary collateral damage. It is intended to be a zero-sum game, as between prerogative and responsibility. Much of our law exists to support norms of stewardship, for it is just this function of our many and varied offices that keeps those in power accountable and within the bounds of their granted authority.
This is how and why stewardship figures so prominently in so many areas of life and the law. It is what we all pretty much know to be true not only in the heart but in the mind as well. The seventeenth century jurist John Selden was speaking about these basic offices and the laws upholding them when remarking that "ignorance of the law is no excuse.' Lawyers may not much appreciate my saying so, but his words meant principally that most law is directed toward the stewardship obligations we all understand by the mere living of life, and do not require a college education to surmise. Much of the equity of law is grounded in the same way.
Now when we encounter adverse reliance such that a healthy part of humanity is aware of a harm, aware as well that no institutions are willing to address it, the law must, like it or not, grant the benefit of the doubt to the stone thrower of last resort, no less than the Supreme Court in throwing the boulder at discrimination. It makes no difference who throws the stone. It is the adverse reliance and the failure of stewardship that matter. You are as good to go as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Julian Assange was as good to go as anyone else in the world. As the law is no respecter of persons, so in equitable remedies of the last resort.
The concern of the law in cases of stone-throwing is to determine whether the vigilante was responding to damage done to protectable interests where legally responsible agencies, obligated to remedy such harms as they are made aware of, were in the end unserviceable or otherwise unwilling to be effectual. That demonstrated, there is nothing to justify anything more than a misdemeanor charge against the stone thrower. That is the basic precept of law and equity. Argue it all day and into the night or until you grow hoarse from yelling, you shall not alter the truth one iota. This is the reality America must learn to understand, both as a democracy and as a presumed "leader of the free world'. When we have become responsible for making ourselves and the world less free, we are in no position to be challenging stone throwers with the toughest teeth of the police and law. We are rather beholden to rethink how we may more accountably manage our prerogatives.
That is the bottom line, the basic norm, a peremptory and unimpeachable norm that no laws can abridge or deny, not even the orneriness of a spurned Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Indeed, an international court is now inquiring after the Obama administration whether it did not in fact wrongfully abet improper police conduct in at least two "occupy' movements in our own country. Note to sleepy Americans: others are watching and listening. We loosen out attachment to stewardship at peril not only of damaging citizens' rights, but of world-wide embarrassment.
Lawyers, all too often left untutored in the more arcane elements of the law that everyone else simply carries nonchalantly in their unconscious minds, require to be informed of an additional point or two. The issue of what laws have been broken by the stone thrower must be considered in the context of adverse reliance and stewardship conceived as herein explicated. It was once thought to be battery against a husband for a wife to throw stones to defend herself against spousal abuse. We, and also the law, were once rather ugly about such things. Now we can understand that her stones broke laws only under any other context. It is the special and select context of her adverse reliance that now fully protects her from those charges, and Julian Assange must be dealt with in similar manner.
All of this nonsense of breached national security interests has to be predicated upon evidence of intentional or negligent harm. Thus far it has not, and thus there are as yet scarcely any grounds for a valid legal case against him. Not, that is, if he can argue 1) that his leaked documents reveal the degree and extent of devious and unaccountable behavior on the part of governments in violation of their sacred duty to hold inviolate the dignity and preservation of the sovereign body politic, and 2) the exercise of reasonable care against collateral harm. Theses are not mere high-flown phrase from old Europe. Both considerations words express what everyone has always known but which those in power choose at their discretion to consider uncomfortable or inconvenient, two excuses the sovereign never intended to permit them to use let alone abuse.
If our government would establish an example of openness and honesty in its stewardship, Julian Assange would quickly fade away. He exists because of wrongs, and will disappear so soon as the wrongs are addressed. Meanwhile, we in this country appear to maintain a morbid fear of whistleblowers and even more of vigilante-style remedies. We require to be reminded that we are a democracy and that stewardship matters. The government and the power structures do not own this country and cannot directly or indirectly supervise or abet damages that are without means of redress. And still they do and they do so without let or hindrance from those charged with their supervision.
These conditions exist throughout the Western cultures, and they are such as to fully justify rocks and stones. A return to stewardship and decency would be rewarded with rocks and stones planted securely where they properly belong, under our feet. It's really pretty simple. If you will not lift a finger to keep your government and power sources accountable, rocks and stones will be the ineluctable resort, like it or not. If you prefer to avoid rocks and stones, do not secure your freedoms behind panes of thin glass. It's just not the terribly bright thing for the seemingly smartest people in the civilized world to be doing to themselves. It announces them to be as petty as their plight is now pitiable.
Accountability is not easy. It requires a strong-willed integrity. It fails when backbones backslide into comfort-loving care-free independence from all other considerations than fast-foods, cars, and promotional hawking beyond the pale (even aristocratic Plato argued that hawkers be required to stay in one place long enough to be held account for possible fraud). People matter. We are not caring for our people when we fail to keep the "powers that be' accountable to the people -- the natural and de jure sovereign. If a law that cannot be enforced has no effect, how much less does a sovereign hope to presume competence if unwilling to hold its delegated agencies accountable? The sixteenth century jurist Jean Bodin admonished the French never to delegate sovereign cares, a practice nonetheless inherent in democratic governance, making accountability as large an admonishment as ever original. We should not be so smug as to meekly abide a government that would place the blame for its arrogance on a single stone-throwing herald of accountability in the form of a Julian Assange.
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