IV. JUSTICE IS PART OF THE LAW: A HYPOTHETICAL CASE INTRODUCTION Legal and political theorists since the time of Plato have wrestled with the problem of whether justice is part of law or is simply a moral judgment about law. An example of the latter is when we speak of an "unjust law." Nearly every writer on the subject has either concluded that justice is only a judgment about law or has offered no reason to support a conclusion that justice is somehow part of law. This Essay attempts to reason toward such a conclusion, arguing that justice is an inherent component of the law and not separate or distinct from it. Given the history of the topic, I start with a disclaimer. The issues involved in these questions are as vast as they are fundamental. I do not pretend to have a definitive solution. I do, however, attempt a suggestive solution based on an extended hypothetical case. If you, the reader, are not persuaded by it, I hope at least that it will have heuristic value for you. Justice to me is a personal thing as well as a concept worthy of study. I believe that you cannot "do justice" to my arguments unless you "know where I am coming from." So I intend to be personal as well as theoretical in this Essay, mingling the approaches shamelessly as I go along. I hope that the casualness of my writing style will not signal to you that the ensuing analysis is easy or off- hand. In fact, the choice of style is quite deliberate. For I believe that the most elusive and hardest ideas are best tackled by the simplest and most direct kind of prose. This is in large part a reaction to my frustration over the years in reading "heavy" prose which often, because of its convoluted style (such as the use of third-person, passive tense, and overly long sentences), turns out to be ambiguous. When the subject of an article is difficult, the last thing we need is an ambiguous analysis of it. The simpler the prose, the more naked are the ideas expressed in support of the author's conclusion. I hope to convey precisely what I mean, and if there is illogic or incoherence in what I say, it will be exposed to your scrutiny, not buried in a heavy style. Let me start by mentioning my current project on justice. For the past decade or so I've been on something of a crusade to persuade law schools to teach justice. 1
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