ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the vexing question of the relation between justice and law. Justice is emphatically not a balancing of particular interests at stake in a concrete case, or even of the interests of determinable classes of persons, nor does it aim at bringing about a particular state of affairs which is regarded as just. Contrary to the older tradition which had regarded justice as prior to law, and at least certain parts of law as limited by conceptions of justice, the contention that the lawgiver was the creator of justice became the most characteristic tenet of legal positivism. The aim of legal positivism is to make coercion in the service of particular purposes or any special interests as legitimate as its use in preserving the foundations of a spontaneous order. Legal positivism has thereby also become the chief ideological support of the unlimited powers of democracy.
