Lady Justice’s Crooked Teeth: Sustainable Judicial Empathy Through (Inter-)Personal Rela(xa)tion(s)

(Verdicts of) Belgian courts do not usually garner the respect of their British or US-counterparts, and even within Europe, Belgium’s judicial administration does not exactly stand-out in a positive way. It would therefore be fair to state that what comes out of Lady Justice’s mouth is often being characterized as “baked air with a problematic whiff”. The crooked-teeth-with-(meta-)braces metaphorical defiguration of Lady Justice proposed in this essay captures both what precedes and what results from subpar, halitosis-inducing breathing habits, a notoriously “under-studied” topic in Western medicine (Cf. P. Gwin, “How ancient remedies are changing modern medicine”, National Geographic January 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/ancient-chines-remedies-changing-modern-medicine. See also: Macnaughton (Body Soc 26(2):30–54, 2020).) a fortiori in Western judicial human resources management. Some widely-shared concerns as to Belgium’s rather unenviable constellation and dito “management” of its legal system’s admittedly most precious resources (i.e. the (wo)men administering justice) are coupled with some commonsensical thoughts on equally cardinal aspects of the judicial mind-set and what we usually associate with it, in order to help deal with malaised judicial officials (and others!). In abstracto or semiotically, this also seems to be the case regarding the justice system as a whole, especially considering how chronic collective stress affects empathy and soci(et)al/ (inter-)personal rela(xa)tions.