The concept of justice in sociolegal studies

Justice is one of the most overused and underspecified concepts in the social scientific study of law. One reason for the lack of conceptual specificity is the uneasiness social scientists experience when asked to make a moral assessment of some decision, act or state of affairs. Naming and observing justice necessitates making a judgment rooted in values: Was an act or decision fair? Was it appropriate? Did it achieve some measure of justness? To engage in such assessments means we need to leave the value-free realm of so-called objective social science. Curiouslygiven the reluctance of social scientists to analyze justice there seems to be general agreement that there are different sorts of justice. Often the word is preceded by an adjective connoting the various distinctions that have been drawn: procedural, substantive, and distributive. Although on the surface these qualifiers would seem to represent ever –finer distinctions of justice, they are actually evasions. Inflecting the qualifier allows us to ignore the core term (procedural justice has something to do with process, but what exactly about a process makes it just?).