ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the operational obstacles to devising principles of justice applicable to the rules of the international system. The exposed role of legitimacy and the minimal role of justice distinguish the international rule system from its domestic counterparts. The chapter examines justice theory, as it has developed in modern jurisprudence, demonstrating its inapplicability to the community of nations at its present condition of evolution. The real injustice of Versailles can only be accounted in units of suffering by individuals, not by some imaginary suffering of that inanimate aggregation known as "the state". The power of legitimacy lies in its capacity to pull those addressed by commands—primarily states— towards noncoerced compliance. The differences between legitimacy and justice arise not from such aspects of their respective structures but from the degree to which the international system has evolved as a community with common assumptions about each measure.
