Concept of Justice – East and West

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In the West justice is dispensed according to the law. Both `law’ and ‘justice’ in the West are concepts and ideas and are, as a rule, more or less fixed ideas. Hence the judgment elicited front the law are often too harsh or too soft, especially because the laws are enacted by an interested faction of a party or parties in power to suit their ideals or convenience which may not fully tally with the changing space-time and personal circumstances. As a consequence from a wholesome view in such lopsided enactment of fixed law, there invariably remain many gaps and loopholes, which beget ambiguities.

Moreover, Platonic declension of the meaning of justice from rendering every body his or her ‘due’, which implies ‘birth right’ to giving one one’s enacting ‘legal right’ (as we have explained in a previous paper); which amounts to denying the natural ‘due right’ and imposing artificial ‘legal right’ by the Majestic will of a sovereign king or emperor or national assembly in the form of carefully formulated laws by learned legal experts and, over and above that, as and when those laws are codified after the model of Justinian Code or Napoleonic Code, the laws being the tools of justice, become highly professional, hardly understandable to the general people for whose welfare these are enacted. Hence, go-between legal experts, lawyers, pleaders, pleaders, advocates, barristers are need to the plead cases to the judges in legal terminology and to interpret the judgment in local dialect to the plaintiff and respondent.

In the Western historical process, the adoption of Platonic declension of the meaning of justice by the Roman emperors and their adoption of an artificial and dead language of Latin as the Roman Imperial Court language, made direct communication between the judges and the plaintiff and litigant (complainant and defendant) practically impossible. To facilitate the legal communication between them the legal usage of installing the mediating pleaders on both sides of the plaintiff and litigant gradually emerged. As we have noticed in our first discourse that in Roman times the pleaders were highly specialized professional lawyers who pleaded the cases of the complainant and defendants, as one against the other, in chaste legal terms before the judges and thereafter placed the judgment in plain language before their respective clients. This usage was doggedly followed by the medieval and modern West, employing the professional advocates and barristers as well as now defunct Indo-British Ukil and Mukhtear, to do the selfsame functions of the pleaders.