Legal Travelogue

THE FACES OF JUSTICE (316 pp.)--Sybille Bedford -- Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

Witnessed in the average, seedy courtroom, the law seldom appears in the vestments of majesty, and the justice it dispenses often descends with a harshness very unlike Portia's rain from heaven. But for Author Sybille (A Legacy) Bedford, courtrooms hold living drama. Two years ago, in The Trial of Doctor Adams (TIME, March 16, 1959), she showed a spectacular talent for lending suspense and excitement to a criminal trial by heightening, not distorting, the events through unsparing observation. Since then she has prowled courts in Britain and all over Europe, observing, with her keen novelist's eye, the quality of justice.

A Form of Terrorism. As she tells her experiences in this book of prose sketches, she observed capital cases and magistrates' trials over some stolen apples, the gaudy, almost cheerful parade of prostitutes through London police courts, and the elusive battles of psychiatric testimony. In all, she found the chilling sense of man in the hands of a man-made machine, a machine straining to be both humane in understanding and inhuman in objectivity. The strain is often hardest on the man on the bench. An English barrister thought a good judge ought to be "Oh, a happily married chap, you know; garden, kind heart, good health and not too much out for himself." To which a magistrate added: "Humanity; common sense; humility; a little law, a very clever chap would be wasted; a sense of humor."

Justice showed its hardest faces in Austria and in France. An Austrian Interlude is marked by the injustice that is created by rudeness and arrogance in judges. On a minor charge of malicious damage (something about a torn curtain), the woman defendant is both badgered and insulted by the court. And in Paris, Author Bedford looked on with fascination and horror at a farcical trial of Algerians. The men may very well have been the terrorists the prosecution claimed they were, but the trial itself was a form of terrorism. The judge was indifferent, the lawyers made irrelevant speeches laced with quotations from French classics, the evidence was spotty and insufficient, the punishment too rough. Said one official with nice Gallic illogic: "It isn't the last word, there'll be an amnesty some day."

Sketches from Life. In Germany, the country where Sybille Bedford was born and which she later came to fear and distrust, she found the highest degree of thoughtfulness and understanding. Whatever the tribunal or whatever the case, it seemed almost as if the entire court system was trying to prove that justice had returned to Germany. In a murder case both judge and prosecution show an impressive sense of fairness. In a divorce case, an alimony hearing, the case of a Czech refugee who had stolen food to stay alive, the human decency displayed by all hands is all the more impressive because it is done without show or procedural fanfare. And yet, amid all the patient and infinitely cumbersome machinery of justice based on the Roman law, the Anglo-Saxon "sporting spirit, the notion of the law as a game of skill with handicaps to give each side a chance, is entirely absent from the Continent."

Author Bedford comes to no conclusions about the faces of justice. She simply sketches them from life, and the lines and creases are what she catches best. In the end, hers is not so much a book about law as a travel book that shows how men in different countries go about the business of judging their frailer fellows. With Sybille Bedford as guide, it is a tour well worth taking.

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