Justice and injustice in law and legal theory Book

Running through the history of jurisprudence and legal theory is a recurring concern about the connections between law and justice and about the ways law is implicated in injustice. In earlier times law and justice were viewed as virtually synonymous. However, experience has taught us that injustice may in fact be supported by law. Nonetheless, the belief remains that justice is the special concern of law. Commentators from Plato to Derrida have called law to account in the name of justice, asked that law provide a language of justice, and demanded that it promote the attainment of justice. They have done so in abstract language as if the demands of justice could only be apprehended accurately outside of history and context. The justice that is usually spoken about is elusive, if not illusory, and disconnected from the embodied practice of law. Furthermore, the very meaning of justice, especially as it relates to law, is in dispute. Justice may refer to distributional issues or it may involve primarily procedural questions, impartiality in judgment, or punishment and recompense. The considerable disagreement over the meaning of justice suggests to some that we lack a full and coherent account of justice. This uncertainty does not mean that justice necessarily should be jettisoned from legal discourse. Rather, we are reminded of the vastness of the relationship of law and justice, of the difficulty of constructing a single account capable of holding together its many strands, and of the space that exists to theorize anew about justice and injustice in law and legal theory. The essays collected in Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory seek to remedy this uncertainty about the meaning of justice and its disembodied quality by embedding inquiry about justice in an examination of law's daily practices, its institutional arrangements, and its engagement with particular issues at particular moments in time. The essays examine the relationship between law and j