Justice & Law Quote by Malcolm De Chazal

A family, De Chazal suggests, isn’t a sanctuary so much as a tribunal with a 24/7 docket. The sting of the line is in its procedural language: “court of justice” drags the supposedly private realm into the public architecture of verdicts, evidence, appeals, and quiet sentencing. By adding “which never shuts down,” he turns intimacy into a kind of permanent surveillance. There’s no closing bell, no weekend, no recess from being evaluated by the people who know your weak spots best.

The intent feels less like moral instruction than exposure. Families like to market themselves as unconditional; De Chazal’s metaphor implies the opposite. The subtext is that kinship runs on judgment as much as affection: you’re constantly on trial for the person you’ve become, the life you’ve chosen, the failures you won’t confess, the loyalties you’ve broken without meaning to. Even “justice” is slippery here. Courts claim neutrality, but families are famously biased, handing down precedents (“in this house we don’t...”), inherited charges, and punishments that look like silence, comparison, or disappointment. The harshest verdicts arrive without formal language at all.

Context matters: De Chazal, a Mauritian writer with a taste for aphorism and psychological compression, is working in a tradition that treats society as a web of coercive roles. His line anticipates a modern insight: the most consequential governance often happens in miniature. Before the state, before the boss, before the crowd, the first institution to police you is home - and it rarely adjourns.