2 - Residues of Injustice

Summary

“Legal justice,” according to a philosophical tradition with a lineage back to Aristotle, requires – perhaps consists of – the mandate to “treat likes alike.” That mandate – which is sometimes called a requirement of “legal justice,” sometimes of “horizontal justice,” and sometimes of “horizontal equity” – is manifested widely in adjudicative law, by no means only in antidiscrimination or civil rights law: by contrast to distributive justice, or social justice, or political justice, legal justice is understood to mean the form of justice distinctively dispensed by courts, rather than by legislatures or executives. “Like” crimes, for example, warrant and should receive like punishments by the courts charged with sentencing them: if two defendants commit the same crime, they should receive the same punishment.