LIFESTYLE

Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam - A Life of and for Law

On 9 November 1988, my father moved my call before Justice F A Chua. It was his first appearance back in Court after the historic decision of the Privy Council that restored him to the rolls. Taking place only 10 days after my wife and I were married, it was one among a brief confluence of happy events that was all too rare in his life, once he had made the decision to enter politics.

The Courtroom was a second home to him - not just as judge and advocate, but as litigant and accused. His approach to law was informed by the belief that law is not just an expression of power but a restraint on it. This had three implications. First, his starting point was that law makers were stuck with the words they had chosen, and a Court should not be too quick to find a meaning that might better effect legislative intent. Second, practising law was all about giving voice to, and finding a remedy for, those at the margins. Third, an advocate's primary quality is tenacity, for without tenacity he will not give sufficient to his client's cause.

The first principle he exemplified both as judge and advocate. As a young magistrate, in the midst of the government's anti-opium crusade he held that a man could not be convicted of 'frequenting' opium dens, if the evidence showed he went to such a place only once. As an advocate, in the early days of road use restrictions, he secured an acquittal for a police inspector who had entered the Restricted Zone without a licence, on the ground that there was no statutory authority for the imposition of a fine. The second was a principle he exemplified everyday of his practice. For example, government servants who considered themselves wrongly dismissed from service flocked to him, and he had many notable successes, including the reinstatement of a young police inspector, Ling How Doong, who later became a lawyer and opposition politician. His tenacity, the third of these key features, was perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the notorious coffee shop murder, when even after full confessions of the three accused had been admitted after a voir dire - in other words, the Court had already concluded that they were made voluntarily - he kept going, turning up evidence of a boast by another prisoner to have been responsible, and then persuading the prosecutor to have the fingerprint evidence compared against that other man's fingerprints. The prosecution withdrew the case, as the confessions of the accused had been thrown into complete doubt.

His political career was in many ways an extension of his legal ideals - closest to his heart were due process, fairness and constitutionality. He had an unshakable faith in the rational capacity of humankind - that people will respond to reasoned argument. This underpinned both his optimism as an advocate and litigant and his belief in democracy, in the will of the people.

It was a hard and lonely life. I glimpsed his isolation from time to time. Once in the late eighties, a senior lawyer chatted with me at a cocktail party until the precise moment when a society photographer appeared, at which point he disappeared without trace - fear of association at one remove. In that moment, I understood a fraction of the uneasy nervousness my father's politics provoked, even among people who by dint of their training should have known better. In spite of this, he counted many lawyers among his good friends, and he believed in the redemptive and civilising effect of a just legal system throughout his life.

A man looks to his father as an example. In my case, I've found one of my surest guides to be the memory of how he behaved to those around him - wife, children, parents, friends, those in need. A memory of how he conducted himself will often serve to curb my natural impatience, or hold me back from harsh judgment and lead me toward a greater generosity of spirit.

Away from the glare of public life, he was very much a family man, taking on responsibilities not only to his immediate family, but to an extended family, that in the Asian way, came to encompass not just those related by blood, but many young people who looked to him for counsel.

Where did he get the strength? The answer to this question, so often asked of me, lies in his religious conviction, that he had to dedicate his life to serve God, and that the way to serve God was to serve one's fellow man, especially the weakest in society. His faith gave him a place to park his troubles, but also determined his mission. The law, and politics, were for him about how to protect the weakest in society. Nothing could deter him from that mission, for, as he once memorably said, 'No force outside a person can destroy that person' - fear comes only from within. Conquer that fear, and all is possible.

Philip Jeyaretnam, SC
Rodyk & Davidson LLP