Abstract
What is justice? Is it a thing? If so, what kind of thing is it? Does this thing do anything to or for anyone and, if so, what does it do? How does one recognize its presence or absence? Or, if it is not a thing, is it a relationship of some sort between things? If so, what kind of relationship is it? to what kinds of things does it pertain? and when does it pertain? Is it the same thing as law? If law and justice are not the same thing, does justice logically antecede law with laws then expected to serve justice? or do laws logically antecede justice and define it instead? Or do laws sometimes define justice while at other times laws are created by man to serve justice? These questions, and many others that will come up in this treatise, seek to understand the Object of the idea we call justice. Until we develop clearer pictures of the various manifestations in experience we have come to associate with "justice" we have only a word for we-know-not-what. Our first order of business, then, is to examine and survey those characteristics, properties, and qualities that are said to be, or to imply the existence of, the idea of justice.