Justice & Law Quote by Lucas Papademos

A technocrat's warning dressed up as a civic virtue: Papademos frames justice not primarily as a moral imperative, but as economic infrastructure. The line is calibrated for an audience that thinks in timelines, risk spreads, and capital flight. Justice delayed becomes a measurable cost - not just to plaintiffs, but to the entire investment climate. The intent is unmistakably instrumental: speed up courts, unclog bureaucracy, and you unlock growth.

The subtext is sharper. By centering "investors" rather than citizens, Papademos signals a hierarchy of urgencies common to crisis-era governance: legitimacy is important, but liquidity is urgent. He implies that even when laws are sound, a sluggish system makes rights functionally uncertain. Investors don't fear regulation as much as they fear unpredictability; delays turn contracts into question marks and enforcement into a gamble. In that sense, "granting of justice" reads less like lofty jurisprudence and more like basic transaction security.

Context matters because Papademos is not a stump-speech populist. As Greece's former central banker and a prime minister associated with the Eurozone crisis management ethos, he speaks the language of institutional credibility. The quote fits a period when countries under market scrutiny were told, explicitly and implicitly, that competitiveness depends on courts that move and administrations that execute. It's also a subtle rebuttal to the idea that reform is only about wages or taxes: without timely dispute resolution, the state itself becomes the bottleneck. Justice isn't just fairness here; it's throughput.