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Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Irish Examiner
Esther McCarthy: Jury duty wasn't the courtroom drama I'd hoped for
'This is an absolute DISGRACE! Have you no respect for our time? I'm not coming back tomorrow.' It's day four of jury duty, and the mob is getting restless. They've just been told they're not excused, even though a jury has just been selected. It's my first time getting called, and I'm excited and a bit nervous, like the couple of seconds after I've asked the hairdresser for a fringe. There are about 200 of us, mostly over 30, a decent gender mix. 'It's my civic duty,' I tell the children, self-importantly, when they're complaining there's no one to give them lifts that day. I wear makeup and all, and deliberate on what to wear. I want to look like a fair, normal, reasonable run-of-the-mill Josephine Soap. Fuck. I don't think I have an outfit for that. They do a roll call and tell us to raise our hand and say 'here'. Some mavericks just say 'yeah'. Others don't show at all, I count 18 boldies on the lang. Not me. I have a notebook. For noting. I fancy myself a Mason, or Matlock or McBeal. They have a quiz channel on. I settle in. I am crushing the Answer Smash part of Richard Osman's House of Games when they put on a video to explain what was going on. 'In Ireland,' an animated voice tells us, 'jury service is one of the most important duties you can perform as an ordinary citizen.' I sit up straighter. I am on crucial business here. '... Court cases do not always run on schedule, so you may have to wait in a jury assembly area.' Well, we can't say we weren't warned. Nothing happens on day one, and there's only so much quizzing one can do in the middle of the day. I am not a first-year law student, sir; I have shit to do. Eventually, we are told to go home as the jury wouldn't be selected today. I had expected to be pacing a small room by now, passionately arguing with the foreperson, who I suspect to be on the payroll of the mob, about a tiny detail in the defence argument that no one else noticed. The judge should decide to sequester us in a hotel because I am deadlocking the jury because all I want is JUSTICE, and to not have to make dinner or do the GAA drops that evening, dammit. But no, just come back tomorrow. Day three, I have a smear of tinted moisturiser and a swipe of mascara. I don't bother putting on my eyebrows or cheekbones. Hmm, Osman can be a bit grating, can't he? I'd love to ruffle his quiff and make him wear normal-sized glasses. Still, at roll call, I maintain my eager beaver energy with the hand up and the loud 'here'. I can feel the 'yeah' fellas down the back thinking, 'What a lick' There's no last-minute evidence delivered by a feisty private eye. No perky blondy pocket rocket who everyone underestimates until her very niche understanding of hair treatments helps to blow the case wide open. No District Attorney's ex-wife striding in to right a wrong on her own terms. Just a lot of us hanging around. I am beginning to get the horrible feeling TV has lied to me. They told us on day one we were allowed to bring snacks, but I paid no heed. Idiot! I start to panic because I'm not supposed to go too long without something to eat. It's not a medical thing or anything, I just really like my nomnoms. I wonder what the punishment is for sneaking out of jury duty for a chicken roll. We are sent home before I start reassessing potential jurors based on which one I'd eat first. The next day in the Big Brother courthouse and I have a bit of SPF on the cheeks, and I leave my bicycle helmet on because I didn't blow-dry my hair. The moron on Who Wants to be a Millionaire goes for the classic mistake of going 50/50 and goes home with a paltry hundred quid. Roll call now sees everyone grunting their presence. The notebook stays in my bag. Then there's a flurry of activity, and we get a live link to the courtroom, where they start pulling name cards out of a hat. It's me! Jesus, I never win anything. But then I go upstairs and hear the case. And it's not like TV. It's a real person standing there being accused of doing terrible things. The charges are scary, awful, and explicit. We're told we need to be available for quite a long period of time. 'You cannot serve on the jury if you know anyone taking part in the trial; you must let the judge know before you have been sworn in or affirmed.' Turns out I do know someone, and I am excused and sent back down to the others in time to hear the fella's rant about wasting our time. I go home with no clever summation in my notebook, no moment of moral clarity. Real life doesn't wrap up in under 30 minutes. Traumas are relived in buildings like this every day, to try to see justice done. It's no game, it's real and it's brutal. I believe in jury duty — I really do. But after that week, I think I'll leave the courtroom dramas to the actors, and stick to comedies for a while.
Daily Maverick
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
In the Court of the Cold — Antarctica has rights, and we're just learning to see them
The curious and, for some, curiously threatening initiative known as the Rights of Antarctica, and, more broadly, the emerging notion of Antarctic Rights has been cast, with increasing anxiety, as a security threat or a direct challenge to the existing power structures and frameworks that currently control how Antarctica is governed. Yet, to read Rights of Antarctica as simply a threat is already to misread it. Or rather, it is to mistake a modest proposal for a revolution, or to confuse enlarging the moral circle with a call to overturn the table. Properly understood and stripped of atmosphere, Rights of Antarctica is a legal movement concerned with giving Antarctica – under an expanded definition – a jural life. As I have noted in this column before, this is not an altogether unprecedented leap. What form this jural life might ultimately take remains undefined. But the draft Antarctic Declaration gestures toward an Antarctica capable of exercising powers like those of a state under international law, a notion some have described as 'environmental statehood'. This should not be confused with an 'environmental state' in the more conventional sense of a nation-state that has developed advanced institutions for environmental governance. There are several theories about how this could take shape. One proposal is that Rights of Antarctica be housed within the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) itself. On the surface, this seems like a tidy solution: integrate Rights of Antarctica as another instrument in the ATS corpus, tack it on like the Madrid Protocol – the agreement that protects Antarctica's environment by banning mining and requiring all activities to minimise harm to its ecosystems – and move forward. But this line of reasoning depends on assumptions that are, at best, optimistic and, at worst, structurally blind. The core difficulty is that Antarctica is protected today not because it is Antarctica, but because harming it would eventually harm us. The current legal regime is anthropocentric not just in its design, but in its logic (and ethics). In other words, the legal system usually only pays attention to nature when something in it starts to affect humans. So, concern flows from us down to the rest of the planet, not the other way around. Rights of Antarctica would invert that presumption. It would begin with the idea that Antarctica is the rights holder, not only the setting on which rights-holding humans negotiate their entitlements. That, understandably, unsettles a few chairs at the table. That said, the core idea behind Rights of Antarctica is deceptively narrow – it's about giving Antarctica a say when big decisions are made. For example, if someone wants to send a fishing boat (Josephine Soap's trawler) into Antarctic waters, we should stop and ask, 'Is this good or bad for Antarctica?' Sometimes the boat might still be allowed to go, but other times we might say no, because Antarctica's well-being matters too. In other cases, Antarctica's right to be left 'cold' may carry greater weight. It's not about saying the old rules are bad (even if that may be the case), it is about making sure those rules are doing what they were supposed to: protecting Antarctica. Rights of Antarctica arises from this felt gap – the legal system's inability to see non-human interest unless it serves human ones. Increasingly, however, that framing no longer fits the facts. A growing number of people are starting to see that Antarctica's needs cannot always be protected by general political promises or polite international meetings. For example, it is one thing to agree in theory that Antarctica should be preserved. It is another to actually stop a country from expanding fishing zones or building new research bases in fragile ecosystems. That is why I suggest we are not dealing with just one system of Antarctic governance, but two. The first governance system consists of Rights of Antarctica in its aspirational form, as well as the provisions of certain ATS legal instruments that already purport to speak on behalf of non-human interests – for example, 'intrinsic' values as contemplated in the Madrid Protocol. The second system governs humans – their conduct, diplomatic consultation and territorial claims. The challenge with the first governance system is that it depends on accuracy. Antarctica is a natural system, so giving it a voice it starts with science. In this setup, regulation comes after understanding. However, the better we grasp the natural laws that shape Antarctica – like its climate, ocean currents and ecosystems – the smarter and more effective the rules for human activity around it can be. I have elsewhere suggested that governing Antarctica's natural system – the first governance system – is best thought of as a famous Millennium Prize Problem. I'm talking about a hugely complex scientific challenge, because a natural system like Antarctica depends on grappling with fluid dynamics. Fluid dynamics are – stay with me on this one – governed by partial differential equations called the Navier-Stokes equations, which even mathematicians still struggle to fully solve. The second governance system focuses on human society and how we interact with Antarctica. It deals with things like territorial claims, research stations and legal decision-making processes among countries. This system is rightly human-centred, because it actually governs the people who govern and use Antarctica, not the continent itself. Ideally, the second, human governance system exists to help us implement the scientific and indigenous insights from the first, non-human one more effectively and fairly. This distinction shows that Antarctic governance is divided. On one hand, it works to legitimise and control human activities in Antarctica. On the other, Antarctic governance tries to protect the very environment those activities endanger. The Rights of Antarctica movement simply brings this hidden contradiction into the open. It is on this basis that the human (and non-human governance systems) should be thought of as a kind of Ship of Theseus. This is the ancient thought experiment that asks: If you replace a ship's planks one by one, at what point does it stop being the original ship? In our case, the laws and institutions that govern Antarctica are slowly being revised, piece by piece, to meet new realities. Eventually, they may look nothing like the structures that first set sail in 1959. But the key point – whether or not we still call it the same system – is that Antarctica still needs something strong, seaworthy and fit for the climate changes and challenges ahead. This work demands a moral education, a period of humility, empathy and intellectual honesty. In June, the Antarctic Rights Working Group met in Devon in southwest England to continue this line of enquiry – just as the Royal Geographical Society awarded South African founding member and lawyer Cormac Cullinan with the prestigious Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions. We spoke about legitimacy of the movement, how Rights of Antarctica relates to the two governance systems, the position of indigenous communities in Antarctic governance and the formal launch of the alliance. To speak of Antarctic Rights is not about protecting Antarctica with new words but about asking what kind of law can stand in right relationship with Antarctica. If justice is to mean anything in the Anthropocene, it must be reoriented beyond the human. DM
