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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...