JUSTICE. In legal language, justice is some times identified with law. as when we speak of the 'administration of justice' or of 'courts of justice.' Even in legal discussion, however, the term is constantly used in an ethical sense, as when it is said that a decision is legally correct, but unjust. To the layman, such an admission is a confession that the law is wrong and should be amended. This. however, is not always true. Law and justice cannot be brought into perfect harmony. It is necessary, above all things, that law be certain; that the individual shall be able to ascertain in advance the results which the law• will attach to his acts or his omissions. Perfect justice demands that every controversy he ad judged on its peculiar merits; that the intelli gence of each party, the circumstances under which he acted, his ignorance or knowledge, his good or bad intent, and an indefinite number of other considerations be taken into account. Should the law attempt to *vide in advance for all these endless variations in so complex an organ ism as human society—an organism, moreover, which is often in process of change—the law would become so vast in its bulk and so confused in its provisions that it would be impossible for the keenest intelligence and the greatest industry to master its rules; and even then it would be incomplete, since, as Grotius has said, "there can be no finite rule of an infinite matter." Should the courts be empowered to do justice in the single case without regard to the law, there would no longer be any law. In either case an
uncertainty, a lack of social order, would result which would be a greater evil than occasional or even frequent injustice.
The practical solution of the difficulty is found in compromise. The law classifies persons, acts, and relations, and it shapes its rules to suit the average person, the ordinary act, the normal rela tion. The classification, rough at first, becomes increasingly refined; hut in its highest develop ment law deals, and must deal, with generic per sons and eases, and not with the real individual or the special ease.
Law is not primarily a system of justice. but a system of order. Courts were not established to do justice, but to terminate controversy. Equity, as was finely said by Aristotle. corrects the law where the law is defective by reason of its universality; but. historically. equity has never meant anything but a greater approxima tion of law and justice. In England. as Lord Bacon said, it was "ordained to supply the law and not to subvert the law." Equity draws new distinctions, unkomn to the older and cruder law; its precedents harden into rules; and the result is simply a new body of law with a more relined classification of the phenomena of social life. Consult the authorities referred to under