Episode 18: The Pursuit of Fairness

Well, well here I am again thrusting my opinions on the world. It's official now apparently, I'm a Law student with no more soul than a mosquito. However, despite this today I would like to talk to you all about justice and the concept of justice. Most dictionaries you look in will define justice with words like fairness or equality, for the sake of this post I'm going to define justice as the pursuit of fairness. In the Australian judicial branch of government justice is carried out in many ways, from the court system to the state and federal policing bodies. However, through some of my readings, my personal belief about justice has been challenged. To understand why we are in this pursuit of justice we need to look at what we define as just and fair, and that is fairly easy. We can look at the codified laws and rules that define us. Nonetheless, the closer we look at our laws the more we will find that the concept of justice is hard to define and even harder to carry out.

In Australia and the United Kingdom in the court system, justice is paying for the crimes you have committed in the for of a 'punishment' ie incarceration or the payment of a fine. For example; if Paul were to physically assault Kate, he could potentially be sent to prison because it's against the law to commit assault. Kate is seen as a witness to his crime and not a victim of a it. Paul has committed a crime against the state and not Kate, despite infringing on her human rights to not be assaulted. There is justice for Paul, however, Kate doesn't not get justice for the repercussions as a result of her being assaulted. Justice for Kate is not seen as being a priority because the crime was not against Kate but the state in the eyes of the law. Despite this, judges are not robots, they don't operate on 'automatic pilot' with immunity to the pressure of values. Their job is not solely 'complete and absolute legalism', otherwise we would not need them, they judge and mediate on a case by case basis. The Hon. Michael Kirby after a lifetime of service to the pursuit of justice and devotion to the rule of law, said that being a judge is not simply upholding the rule of law and maintaining legislative integrity but to judge with values and consideration to the situation. All parties in a crime should receive their justice, not just the perpetrator.

Justice and fairness are not ideas easily carried out, there will always be a degree of unfairness, however, the law should work hard to minimize this. As humans we pursue fairness, but fairness and justice are different from a vendetta.