LAWS 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ant-Zen, Lon L. Fuller, Good Governance
5 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
LAWS1000
1
Law in Social life
Lecture 2
LAW AND JUSTICE
• What is the purpose of law?
o Order? Justice? Peace?
o What is deemed morally and unmorally acceptable
• What is the proper foundation of law?
o Whose law? What order?
• What are the structures through which law functions – that is, what does law look like?
• Law is tempered with mercy
• Aristotle distinguished between two types of justice
o 'natural justice' which arises from the 'nature of things' and exists independent of
human action
o 'conventional justice' which arises from human intervention and exists as a result of
human action
• Aristotle believed that every person has a purpose
o Need a certain set of conditions
o People need to actually create a set of rules
o Good governance – when people come together to live in society
• For Aristotle, in order for there to be good governance, there needs to be good law
• We do not all agree on what is right and wrong
• Law and justice are both "ultimately concerned with how subjects ought to act in a given
sets of circumstances when different actions are possible"
• Always confronted with choices
• Most of us make the tough choices based on an assessment on right or wrong outcomes
• Morality is what drives our choices
• Because law is directly or indirectly involved in specifying what ought to be done in
specific situations, law cannot help but involve moral matters in one way or another
• Morality is about good and bad
• Law is about encouraging the good and sanctioning the bad
• The worst of people can do the worst of things with the best of law
• Lon Fuller – the 'internal morality of lawmaking'
• John Finnis – realization of 'self-evident moral truths'
FULLER
• Law is "the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules"
• The moral authority of law making resides in the procedures through which people carry
out the rule of law in a given context
• Those procedures must possess a coherent and unique "internal morality' that implies a
set of 'distinctive, internal rules that [legal] practitioners must follow"
• It is this internal morality which makes law - and obedient law - possible
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