Legal Justice as a Methodological Question

This article reframes legal justice as a methodological problem internal to law application rather than as a primarily philosophical claim about the moral quality of outcomes. It argues that established theories of justice tend to illuminate the structural architecture of justice while leaving underspecified the inner mechanics of legal decision-making, namely the way social conflict is translated into legally controlled reasons. Against “black box” conceptions of law, the analysis distinguishes political justice in law-making from legal justice in adjudication and administratively issued decisions subject to judicial control. Central to this shift is the separation between normtext as the externally fixed form of a legislative idea and legal norm as the internally constructed form that emerges through interpretation in and for the conflict. On this basis, a three-phase model of substantive justification is proposed: (i) the ordering of social reality into legally relevant facts in the hearing, (ii) the articulation of the normative programme and delimitation of the normative sphere after the hearing, and (iii) the written substantiation connecting these constructions to the ruling. The article further develops a post-normative account of legal construction, showing why opentextured terms (for example “reasonable time” and “good faith”) cannot function as syllogistic premises without contextual concretisation. The core benchmark of legal justice is identified as reproducibility of reasons: a decision is methodologically just insofar as its justificatory path is transparent, contestable, and reviewable by third parties, thereby operationalising rule-of-law constraints while remaining distinct from claims of moral rightness or substantive correctness.