If you're searching for answers to perplexing questions like "what is justice?" the Legal Theory Lexicon has the answers.   

"Why," you ask, "would anyone but first year law students, law professors or professional philosophers even care?"  The issue of "justice" is an academic question, you think, or one of those  3 a.m. dorm room inquiries, best answered with clouds of sweet herbal smoke hanging in the air.  There's no "real world" application for it, is there?

Well, yes. 

Those of us who are mediators are constantly grappling with and explaining issues of fairness, justice, and equity to people who feel:  (a)  they've been horribly injured, betrayed, bloodied, rejected, abandoned and generally %$#^&%'ed up by litigation -- we call these people plaintiffs; or who believe (b) they're being extorted, black-mailed, manipulated, stripped, disrespected and generally %$^&*#$'ed up by lawsuits -- we call these people defendants.

Problem solving, negotiating and integrative bargaining are all well and good, but until the parties gain some understanding of the principles operating the system in whose gears and levers they have become enmeshed, they will not be free to craft a meaningful resolution to their litigated disputes. 

And if you think this applies less to senior executives, owners, inventors, CEO's and the like than it does to the archetypal "man on the street," think again.  Only lawyers and judges feel comfortable in the legal system.  Everyone else feels damaged by it.

I've described elsewhere my attempts to acquaint litigants with the vagaries, inconsistencies, delays, burdens and costs of a legal system that has become their personal perfect storm of ill luck.  I probably don't need the arcane legal theory that goes with my plain talk about "justice."  Nevertheless, I am always searching for new ways to describe it  to myself if not necessarily to the parties whose dispute I help resolve.  

So for my edification and that of anyone else in the business of explaining THE LAW to those in its grip, I offer the following short essay on procedural justice from the Legal Theory Lexicon.  

Slicing a Cake Our approach to the idea of procedural justice may be made easier by using a simple example. Consider the familiar procedure for dividing a cake: the person who slices the cake picks last. What makes this a fair procedure? One answer to this question might be the following: there is an independent criterion of what constitutes a fair outcome, equal slices for all, and the slicer-picks-last rule assures that we will get to this outcome.

Slicer-picks-last is fair because guarantees accuracy. Or does it? If we really wanted to assure perfectly equal slices, then we could use a compass and the principles of plane geometry, with equal shares as a more reliable result. But this strikes us as an undue amount of fuss to go through when slicing a cake. Perhaps, the reason we believe that the slicer-picks-last rule is a fair procedure is that it strikes a fair balance between the importance of the outcome and the cost of getting there: the rule gets us close to equal shares most of the time at a reasonable price. Slicer-picks last might be considered fair, because does a good job of balancing. Or is there something more to the idea that the slicer-picks-last rule is fair?

Maybe the reason we believe that the slicer gets a fair share is because the slicer was the one who did the cutting; the slicer's participation in the cutting validates the outcome, even if the slicer ends up with a smaller slice (or among the calorie conscious, a bigger slice). Slicer-picks-last could be a fair rule, because of process independently of outcome.

Practical examples next.