Leis no mundo luso-hispanico, e no mundo anglo-saxao: Stanley Hilton

Discutindo pela internet com meu amigo Stanley Hilton, brasilianista e professor de história da América Latina na Universidade da Louisiana, em Baton Rouge, sobre as diferenças entre o respeito à lei no mundo ibérico e no mundo inglês e americano, ele me forneceu toda uma explicação, na verdade uma aula completa, que me permito transcrever aqui para deleite dos leitores deste blog:

In my Latin American history courses, I used to tell students that the difference between law in Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic countries was that, in the Latin tradition dating back to the Romans, law was normative, i.e., it posited an ideal situation, whereas in A-S countries it reflected custom or social practice. So the US Constitution, for example, reflected deeply-rooted “democratic” traditions and, therefore, it endured; in Latin American countries, the constitutions drawn up during the era of independence from Spain/Portugal reflected an ideal—and, hence, they proved unworkable in most cases.  The symbol of this phenomenon, in the colonial period, was the Consejo de las Indias –a body that sat in Spain, thousands of miles away from the New World, and hence thousands of miles away from the geographic and social reality of the colonies, and drew up detailed laws governing all aspects of colonial life.  The laws were unworkable, so people disobeyed the law on a daily basis.  In Luso-Brazilian terms, they found a “jeito” of circumventing laws and regulations.  As you know, there was the vice-regal mechanism, in Spanish America, of obedezco-pero-no-cumplo.  If a law reaching, say, New Spain, was so impractical, a viceroy could proclaim his loyalty and obedience (“obedezco”), but suspend implementation of the new law (“pero no cumplo”) until the Consejo could consider the reasons (which he would put in petition form) why he thought the law was not a good one.  It was used rarely because  thousands of laws were churned out by the Consejo.  Down through the generations, Latin Americans were socialized to think that disobeying laws was not necessarily immoral because they were so out of harmony with local conditions. I remember a Mexican acquaintance humorously saying to me in a car fifty years ago, as he ran traffic light after traffic light and noticed how nervous I had become,  “Las leyes, como las mujeres, fueron hechas para ser violadas”—this itself shows how, in popular custom, the attitude toward law was not “Anglo-Saxon.”  And, of course, an extensively corrupt public bureaucracy was one outgrowth of that (Hispanic) attitude toward law.  It is no coincidence that the most corrupt state in the U.S. is Louisiana, whose legal tradition in rooted in Spanish and Naopoleonic concepts of law.

Eu mesmo costumo dizer que a diferença básica entre um mundo e outro se situa no seguinte plano:
No mundo anglo-saxão, tudo o que não estiver expressamente proibido por leis, ou por alguma disposição qualquer do sistema legal, está ipso-facto permitido aos espíritos empreendedores, que podem formar rapidamente uma empresa para explorar alguma atividade econômica qualquer.
No mundo português -- e era assim também no mundo ibérico e hispano-americano, e suponho que continue sendo assim -- tudo o que não fosse especialmente concedido pelo poder real, por meio de um alvará régio, um ordenamento qualquer do soberano, estava literalmente proibido a todo e qualquer súdito da Coroa.
Creio que não deixamos de ser súditos do Estado, e estamos proibidos de fazer qualquer coisa, antes de conseguir uma permissão qualquer.
Segundo o último Doing Business Brazil, leva mais ou menos 120 dias (talvez mais) para conseguir constituir uma empresa e o empresário começa pagando antes de ganhar qualquer coisa (e depois ainda costuma entregar quase a metade do que ganha para o Estado, sob diversas formas de impostos, tributos, taxas, contribuições, propinas, etc.).
Como é que vocês querem o Brasil crescendo dessa forma?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida