Can We Save Justice?

“Maintain justice and do what is right.” Isaiah 56:1

Since antiquity, justice, its meaning, the mechanics of how it is applied, to whom, and for what reasons have been central to ideas of political organization and the attendant legal structures created to exercise that justice. For tyrannies, despots, democracies, and republics alike.

For thousands of years, the perception of justice has been a central explanation of personal integrity and the motivation for public ethics. It has been at the heart of legal and political theory. Justice was measured as the essential classical virtue by the ancient Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans, among others, as the instinct and craving for fairness or even-handedness in human relations seem to be hard-wired into the human family universally.   

In the modern world, the quest for justice is bound to the struggle for human freedom and is best described in the American Founding (drawing from the Magna Carta and English common law). The ideals of liberty, equality, and justice anchored the Republic’s original documents. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and civilization’s crown jewel —the Bill of Rights—each contributed towards a covenantal relationship between the people and the government they set in motion. Its premise was that for free citizens to live securely in the freedom of personal actions and economy, the laws and activities of the government must be just and equally applied regardless of a citizen’s status. That justice must be equal. Regardless of its faults and stumbles, of which we are reminded daily, it has proved to be the benchmark for justice in an unjust world.

Regrettably, this yearning for justice and the composition of men’s nature are constantly at war with each other. The DNA of justice broadly – and specifically as delivered in any legal system – always carries the potential for corruption and grave injustice. It’s an irony as old as human civilization itself. Cicero termed it the “corruptions of customs” as the Roman Republic unwound.

In dictatorships and communist tyrannies, of course, the corruption is paraded with deliberate pride with no pretense that justice is supposed to be objective. It’s all about the raw exercise of power and coercion.

However, in the West, with its democracies and republics, justice is central to political and economic security, and the rules carry the imprimatur of impartiality. It is supposed to be the great equalizer that maintains a legal civil construct where property rights, commerce, and society’s rules of the road, so to speak, can be weighed using the scale of justice and equity. (Mind you, it is not the equity of outcome – the current flighty oxymoron – but the equity that no individual or group was privileged and above the law.)

Yet, time and again, mature nations (including the EU) succumb to the temptations of manipulating justice for both political and financial advantage. Perhaps no better examination of this fabric or corruption has been explained than by the French economist, writer, and member of the French National Assembly, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850).

Bastiat wrote extensively and was an influential figure in his time – introducing the concept of “opportunity cost” and the “parable of the broken window” in his 1850 essay, “That Which is Seen, and That Which Not Seen.” But he is best remembered for his classic and brilliant essay, The Law (read here), which is a must-read for this topic. In it, he examines the irresistible forces that tempt corrupt politicians to hijack the law for financial and political gain.

Bastiat laments, “The law becomes the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish!”

Like many of you, the delivery of justice in its legal and emotional machinations forged my experiences with justice in the flames of trial and tribulation. Analogous to the proverbial sausage, once you experience the making of the “justice industry” firsthand, you often lose your taste for it.

At the local, state, and national levels, America’s justice system has been falling into corruption for many decades. It has taken on the very characteristics and manifestations of a dark and wicked force – driven by the same avarice and love of power that drives the worst tyrants that Bastiat wrote about.

The truth is that we, broadly speaking, no longer have a system of justice but rather a massive industrial operation, from law enforcement up through the court systems that is dependent on a continuous flow of raw material. Justice is now a big business with little risk – increasingly setting the law itself aside and making its own rules.  

Nationally, this is more obvious than ever. The inherent organizational incompetence of the Department of Justice, including the agencies with lots of guns, like the FBI, ATF, and DEA, has steadily deteriorated into systemic corruption. The stench of rot and dishonesty has become a “clear and present danger.” Too often, these agencies are proving to be little different from those they claim to pursue. Sadly, the nation’s intelligence community is no better, just more subtle.

The death of the DOJ and FBI have been a long time coming. Years ago, I began writing on the pattern of lies, obfuscation, and dishonesty that both the DOJ, the FBI, and others seemed to have incorporated into their operations with accelerating frequency. From JFK, King, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Atlanta Olympics, 9-11, the Anthrax case, Enron, political vendettas and spying, FISA lies, the Russia “pee” tape hoax, entrapping Carter Page and General Michael Fynn, surveilling and questioning protesting parents at School Board meetings doesn’t scratch the surface of public wrongdoing and corruption uncovered. It gets only worse, never better.

Some cases may have started as simple incompetence or dropping the ball. Regardless, lying under oath, manipulation, or destruction of evidence to make a case or gain a conviction seems to have become a standard process.

Now, justice is turned on its head almost every day. Like a third-world hell-hole, heavily armed FBI agents in ballistic vests show up in armored vehicles with regularity to capture desperadoes – like former government officials with whom the government disagrees who are dragged out of bed and paraded in front of the media in their PJs at dawn. Or older women praying at abortion centers. You know, real hardened criminals – the type that needs a 20-officer heavily armed caravan to subdue.

In addition to the courts, we are now witnessing other government regulatory agencies and private, professional organizations engaged in active lawfare, where a mob ignores justice altogether and delivers political retribution. Attorneys and doctors are being increasingly attacked by their professional organizations and denied the right to practice. John Eastman, long considered one of the finest constitutional experts in the US, was recently disbarred in California after numerous groups filed ethics complaints over his work for former President Trump in 2020 concerning challenging the election in Congress – a position, whether you agree or disagree, is a Constitutional issue that has been debated for over a century by many scholars and lawyers.   

Other government agencies, like the FDIC and the SEC, have also wandered into this legal thicket, promising more regulation aimed at raw political issues and positions, such as climate change and DEI. You will be on the right side even if you don’t want to be on any side. 

As a law-and-order proponent, your humble writer advocates for the police and law enforcement in general. Yet, now I find myself more convinced  – and more grieved – than ever that the corruption of both the DOJ, the FBI, and the intelligence agencies constitute a clear and present danger to the Republic. Worse, they are beyond reform. Justice demands that they be emptied of top management and rebuilt from the ground up.