Essay on Justice

Essay on Justice

‘Justice is such an elusive concept that it hardly seems worthwhile

for a legal system to strive to achieve it’.

Justice is something that we all want from a Law and believe should be

an integral part in any legal system. However, the meaning of Justice

is very difficult to define. There are many aspects of justice that we

may question about; i.e. is a particular law just? Is the legal system

just? Much of the issue of justice is very controversial and raises

questions such as whether the combination of Law and system produce a

just result? Justice has a definition as follows: ‘The quality of

being just or fair, the act of determining rights and assigning

rewards or punishments’ Webster’s dictionary. This definition of

Justice is vague and will be discussed further.

One must take into account that the issue of justice also has other

elements drawn into it: i.e. morality and justice. This illustrates

that the law has been attributed with many objectives. These

objectives are culminated from theoretical perspectives such as

Positivism v Natural Law, Utilitarianism, Marx and Rawls. Other

objectives associated with the Law and Weber, Durkheim, Llewellyn and

Devlin debate justice. These theorists bring greater depth of

explaining the significance of the objectives of Law in the English

legal system, and also emphasises on how justice is expressed. For

example, justice can be inherently linked to moral obligations in

which the theorist Devlin lays down this view. We can further discuss

the significance of the objectives; the theory of Natural Law. It is

based on the idea that there is a divine source of Law, wh...

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.... The Discrimination Law could also prove to be

a problem as it only protects certain categories. For example, other

religions apart from Christianity are not approved within the Legal

system.

Although the Law seems to adopt some positivist aspects such as

parliamentary sovereignty and separation of powers, we should look up

to the legal system in a optimistic way as justice is clearly an

aspiration of the Law as evidenced by the symbol of the ‘weighing

scales’. It is also evident that the Law is adhering to the natural

law as the European Convention of Human Rights have been implemented

so this shows that there is a shift from strands of positivism to

principles of the natural law. This helps society to enforce their

views as a whole and also helps elevate justice as one of the

principle object of practical Law.