Pocket Résumé
PAULO BARROZO
Degrees: LLB, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; PhD in political science, Rio de Janeiro University Research Institute; SJD, Harvard. Career: Lecturer on social thought, Harvard, 2006-2009; faculty, Boston College Law School, 2009-date; John C. Ford, SJ, Distinguished Scholar and Associate Dean of Faculty and Global Programs, Boston College Law School, 2024-date. Scholarship: Articles in numerous peer-reviewed journals in the US and Brazil, including Law & Contemporary Problems, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Criminal Law and Philosophy, Global Policy, Revista Direito e Práxis, and Revista de Direito Administrativo.
The Idea: Unchanging laws helped simpler societies of the distant past achieve stability. Today’s highly complex societies, by contrast, in perpetual need to adapt, require continuous change in laws to achieve stability.
The Impact: In a commencement speech last May, Professor Paulo Barrozo offered what he called an ancient, archetypal tale about a band of “furies,” unprincipled, cruel, vengeful, and greedy people who took over the city and ran it as a criminal enterprise. The only check on the furies was the force of law, with a capital L. But Law also faced obstacles in battling the furies. “First,” said Barrozo, “the furies, even if conquered, would never fully leave the city. Law could only contain them….” Secondly, he said, to lawyers’ frustration, the results of their work were necessarily imperfect and slow in coming.
In scholarship including a 2021 article in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Barrozo digs deeper into the theme of his speech, though not in ways accessible to every reader, as he sees himself writing from a theoretical perspective for experts with a similar focus, “trying to make progress on our understanding of the law of high complexity societies such as the United States and our global legal order.”
Barrozo looks back to early societies for insight into how their “customary law” evolved into the immensely sophisticated law found in high complexity societies. An important finding of that research is that today’s complex societies are “only stable because our laws change all the time.” Indeed, he estimates that our legal system changes thousands of times daily, most often in the form of small but sorely needed adjustments to things like local zoning codes and regulations of important but highly technical matters such as how much ethanol to add to gasoline.
The constant change is socially stabilizing only because of what Barrozo calls paradigms of legal thought, “compelling ideas about the main contours of society to which the lawyers of every generation are introduced and incentivized to embrace.” Legal paradigms include ideas and values that crystallized more than a century back and are still accepted by most lawyers of every ideological stripe—individual rights, a state separated from both religion and markets, equal protection of the laws, separation of powers.
Legal paradigms allow us to “focus on solving efficiently, in ways that are value-aligned, the problems that emerge in day-to-day society.
“As a society, we have to resolve practical problems in ways that are sufficiently efficient,” Barrozo says. “We [also] have to come up with solutions compatible with [our] values.” Paradigms, he explains, allow us to “focus on solving efficiently, in ways that are value-aligned, the problems that emerge in day-to-day society.”
If law runs a little behind or ahead of prevailing values, people will accept it. But if the gap is too wide, then faith in the legal system can weaken. Barrozo also believes that we citizens must understand and accept the occasional disruptions and constant imperfections of our hyper- dynamic legal system in order to sustain social stability and cultural vitality. Even with the benefit of the time-tested process of tailoring law to values, the almost unfathomable complexity and constant change in our societies can place a heavy burden on our ability to stay on top of things, causing stress and exhaustion, not to mention vertigo. And that’s where the furies-like simplifiers come in, wannabe strongmen who promise to relieve our exhaustion and stress if only we discard the law and let them rule as they see fit.
Yet, as antique maps warn, here there be monsters. The last time simplifiers ruled a large part of the globe, Barrozo points out, we saw World War II, the Holocaust, the carpet bombing of entire cities, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of millions died; whole countries lay in ruins.
Barrozo won’t predict where our current crop of simplifiers—men who rule “from Buenos Aires to Washington to Budapest to Moscow”—may lead us, but he worries, given the history. “My work,” he explains, “shows how painful, how long the road to get to the imperfect legal systems we have was, and that should give us pause about parting company with them.”
Law, Barrozo says, asks a lot of us if we are to organize our societies through it. With law, progress is never complete or fast enough to fully match our aspirations. But whatever progress we make has a better chance of lasting if made through law. “There is more impulsivity than reflection,” he says, “in the call to take our chances with the furies rather than with the law.”
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