Justifying Justice - An objective law?

“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be” –Raymond Chandler


“The Criminal Justice System Should Institute Rehabilitation Rather Than Retribution”. Proposing this statement was suicide to many. Indeed, it was. We left.
The law was always meant to be a “mechanism”, in many ways, similar to that of David Ricardo’s concept of the “invisible hands”. In this sense, I think the law is the best objective expression and a concrete version of social sanctions in society. From a constructionist perspective, it follows that societal rules must have paved the way to the creation of a legal paradigm, - one that ought to be seen as a “mechanism” which dictates normality and illegality- the Law.

I have always (and most people) tried to scale the opposing nature of objectivity and subjectivity to explain what I would consider an ideal framework. Contrary to many criticisms of such a belief, I stand by your side that the world and society isn’t realistically such. It is tainted with imperfections and prejudices that would make an ideal society an ideal itself. However, similar to Weber’s idealism, it was merely an ideal version of which the standards of society are to be contested, and that therefore, I use to trace back to the beginning of how things were objectively created to have been.

To the Marxists, the law has been always biased from the moment it existed. In fact, it was a concretely biased expression of the oppression in society! I think it is therefore the root by which it is seen as an imperfect mechanism; because it is the creation of the powerful, more dominant class in society to legitimize their ideologies at the expense of those who fail to “press exactly the right button”.

The law (objectively) is not an adversarial trial of luck. Those who weren’t advantaged in the law-making process would not be protected by the law and subsequently appear unlucky. The law does not uphold justice because it is a carefully crafted justification by which a certain class would be able to maneuver to rationalize inequalities. It is a perfect mechanism which was always intended to secure positions.

An objective law however, claims to promote justice. That in every wrong, they will be acknowledged to balance the equation. But it is this acknowledgement which seems to be the point where justice appears to be a subjective endeavour to pursue. “Acknowledgement” of a particular act is in itself interpretative. Two years ago, we have been rebutted that once a wrongdoer had committed a wrongful act, it follows that his rights should have been forfeited in the light of “lawfully” receiving punishment of a corporal nature. It was argued that the retributive laws recognize parallel justice in that corporal punishments are proportionate to the severity of crimes committed. We had responded then, that should a rape victim rapes back the offender to equalize the other’s act in the name of true justice? After all, it seems to be the most proportionate way to claim justice no matter how unethical it may be. Can justice therefore be partly unethical? Vengeance seems to have lost its character under the law.

As the law does not retaliate in an equal manner, it opts for the closest possible way. Freedom of movement withdrawn, lives taken away, and boiling down actions to monetary arbitraries. Realistically, there would definitely be actions that are not restorable to its utmost entirety in the most proportionate possible manner. Compensatory laws are one such. However, for this purpose of thought, being such would mean that justice can never truly be achieved. The law is like a vendor; a process by which an action is translated into another action that is collectively claimed to be on proportionate terms for penalizing purposes. In this sense, could we not say that retribution is equally less valid in upholding justice than rehabilitative laws already do?

My version of justice is not one upheld by the law. I would think that justice is a brutal concept of one hit one equals zero. That objectively, it is equal in every proportion. Not one which substitutes proportionality with “reduced” means that claims to be parallel to an act. Justice may be a neutral concept after all as ethics may not be an issue.

It remains that the closest possible route to justice whilst balancing ethics is the modified version of justice itself- the law. It is indeed an imperfect mechanism but not one that the law ever intended to be, because justice can never be justified.