76 - Formal justice

Summary

Rawls’s principles of justice are designed to be applied to the institutions of the basic structure of society. An institution, for Rawls, is “a public system of rules which deine ofices and positions with their rights and duties, powers and immunities, and the like” (TJ 47). So the principles of justice aim to identify principles to be used in determining when these public rules are just. But even if the institutional rules are not fully just, the institutions may still realize formal justice. This is achieved when there is “impartial and consistent administration of laws and institutions, whatever their substantive principles” (TJ 51). Rawls follows Sidgwick in holding that “this sort of equality is implied in the very notion of a law or institution, once it is thought of as a scheme of general rules” (TJ 51). In the case of legal institutions, it is an aspect of the rule of law, which also includes elements such as generality, publicity, and due process. Rawls does not explicitly address whether these elements are also part of formal justice, but he does suggest the use of the phrase “justice as regularity” for the “regular and impartial, and in this sense fair, administration of law” (TJ 207).