Livia: Formal Justice and Rawls

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Within Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, he speaks to the notion of formal justice or the “impartial and consistent administration of laws and institutions” (50). Formal justice requires that their administration laws and institutions must be applied equally by those subject to them. Interestingly, formal justice assumes that institutions are just and thus excludes injustices such as corrupt judges who fail to adhere to appropriate rules or interpretations when ruling on cases (50). To Rawls, within formal justice, the judiciary acts as beacon to fairly apply the appropriate laws and honor the legitimate expectations of those laws (likely through interpretation) (51). Of course, as we have learned from Scalia, the way in which judges go about interpreting the vagueness of laws has the potential to be arbitrary. Rawls appeals to an allegiance to justice in order to properly guide judicial decisions. I suppose I am struggling to reconcile with how a judge might practice (not sure if this is the right word) formal justice or partake within the formal justice system when interpreting and applying the law. 

There are two major questions which I am considering. The first question is how judges can go about applying the law in a fair and equal way? Does each individual ease no present a bounty of individual issues which do not translate to each other case? I suppose that formal justice is devised to counter this issue, but I find it hard to believe that a judge can practically enforce a rule in the same way after considering the individual’s circumstance, perhaps witness testimonies speaking to an individual’s character, actions in the case, etc. Judges can appeal to precedent and even the principles of justice to promote a defined system, but is does not mean that their actions will result in uniformity. It appears that divergence from a formal justice system seems inevitable. The second question is how judges can interpret laws in accordance with formal justice? Does formal justice imply that judges must always interpret the same law in the same way? This highly seems plausible for the way in which people violate laws is distinct, and how they might be punished is distinct. Does formal justice imply that judges must interpret the law through a “formalized” process, i.e., some form of originalism? As we have learned, a formalized process for interpreting the law still results in great variability for judicial decisions. Generally, it seems difficult to separate this notion of formative justice from other ideals, personalized, factors, etc.


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