POLS 102 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Majoritarianism, Legal Formalism, Consociationalism
16 Mar 2017
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Four differences in interpreting the meaning of justice : can be summarized as a kind of legal positivism. The law of a particular country is neither more or less than the sum of the laws, which it has established. The wording of each individual law as approved by the parliament, as well as the whole legal code, is sacrosanct. It is inappropriate for judges to seek to enquire whether any particular law is phrased inadequately. In pre-modern china, the legalists were not especially interested in. Justice except in so far as an orderly society was also a just one, they wanted to deter law-breaking as that would be unjust: the second approach to the social function of law was typified by communist states. Here, the function of law was subordinated to some higher, non-legal goal: communism itself. Judges had to be members of the communist party, which meant they had to defer to the party leadership.
