2024-11-18
The concept of justice is fundamental in many spheres of human life and in academic disciplines such as law, philosophy, and theology. This article surveys a range of concepts of justice from these disciplines, threading a path from the idea of justice as fairness or proportionality in the works of Hart, Kelsen, and Rawls, to the notion of justice applied in a legal system (juridical justice) as understood by Gunther Teubner, then to concepts of justice beyond equivalence in the work of & Aacute;gnes Heller, either seeing justice as a step toward the good or understanding justice as righteousness. The article ends up discussing the idea of love as justice with the help of Paul Tillich. This paves the way for the possibility of critiquing worldly law and juridical justice from the perspective of an ontological concept of justice. The aim of the article is to put the understanding of justice which dominates the conceptual apparatus of the legal discipline in a new and critical light.