Concept

Gaston Jèze

Summary
Gaston Jèze (March 2, 1869, Toulouse – August 5, 1953, Deauville) was a French academic, humanitarian and human rights activist. He was a professor of public law and the resident of the International Law Institute. During the 1930s, he served as legal counsel to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who had been deposed and exiled by the Italian Fascists. During World War II, he spoke out against the persecution of Jews and other minorities by Vichy France. He was a leading proponent of and was largely responsible for promoting the establishment of finance as a separate discipline in the universities of France. He contributed to the shift in thinking from the notion of "power in the public sphere" to the idea of "public service". He taught at the Faculty of Law of Paris. A specialist in public finance and administrative law, Jèze was one of the first academics to author a study of legal phenomena such as financial phenomena that takes into account all factors, whether legal, economic, financial, social or political . In his work, he promoted the need for a careful and rational scientific study of the "facts" of a case or situation, carefully separated from the political points of view inevitably taken. In economics, he is recognized as having made the public finances a real branch of economic analysis, especially through his "law of equilibrium", often called the "law of Jèze". During the 1919 elections, Jeze stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in Guadeloupe for the Colonial Socialist Party. He subsequently left politics completely. In his academic work, Jèze, strongly and effectively made the case for democracy over authoritarian rule. Despite his belief in the superiority of democracy over dictatorship, he was no shallow and conformist ideologue, and his positions were deep, insightful and nuanced. According to him, "the benefits of democracy are mostly formal, that is to say related to the public and adversarial procedure that accompanies the decision.
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