In this set of reflections, Sir David Baragwanath, former Justice of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, part-time President of the Court of Appeal of Samoa and Appellate Judge of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague, considers some of the ways in which judges and lawyers situate themselves within the familiar and the foreign. He urges reflection on the challenge of the judicial oath to ‘do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm without fear, favour, affection or ill-will’, as enriched by the basic judicial precepts of modestie et audace – caution – and mains tremblantes – the need for care, sensitivity and humility – to control personal predilections and learn and comprehend the distinctive values that underlie what, to an outsider, is novel jurisprudence. Judges ought to strive for a ‘periscope’ approach, in order to penetrate the mists of their own education and experience and search for answers congruent with the values of the unfamiliar law or society illuminated by a vision of its highest standards.

This chapter synthesises the broad picture that emerges from Irish constitutional proeprty law about the mediation of property rights and social justice, and about the impact of progressively framed constitutional property guarantees on that mediation. It highlights the rewards for progressive property theory of doctrinal analysis and a wider comparative lens. Most fundamentally, it emphasises the political nature of constitutional property law in two ways. FIrst, judges gravitate away from innovative interpretation and application of ideas like social justice towards deference to the determinations of the elected branches of government. Second, constitutional property law can have political, and wider cultural effects, that do not reflect the strict legal effect of constitutional property rights as reflected in doctrine. It concludes that Irish constitutional property law demonstrates the challenges of implementing progressive property ideas in legal doctrine, but at the same time provides an illuminating example of a broadly coherent and effective attempt to implement a progressive constitutional structure for achieving partial resolutions of the tension betwene property rights and social justice.