ABSTRACT
Justice can concern the procedures and the decisions of courts of law, of tribunals and of their less formal counterparts (such as the authorities of schools and families, head teachers and parents). Judicial and quasi-judicial justice is governed by various rules, rules which have to be interpreted and administered by authorities such as judges. Judicial justice is subordinate to distributive justice. This chapter considers this, the pivotal variety of justice. It discusses the principles of natural justice, and in particular the impartiality and its justification. Consequentialism can, after all, cope with the supposed problem of distributive justice. This problem can be surmounted as long as the theory of value allied to consequentialism is a suitably sensitive one. Indeed exceptions which breach the principles of natural justice strike at all the practices and institutions which are informed by these principles.
