The Legal Element, Justice, comes from the concepts of fairness and impartiality. It’s also important to note that Justice is distinct from Law. While it is the intent of the legal system to create laws that support the policies of fairness and impartiality, it’s understood that the system of law is imperfect in its attempt to achieve justice. Therefore we talk about law and justice as separate legal elements.
For instance, let’s look at a common type of contract dispute. In general, a contract requires a "meeting of the minds" between all parties to form a legally binding agreement. It occurs sometimes, though, that one party has good reason to believe that an agreement has been reached when in fact there has been no true meeting of the minds. Now let’s say that one party incurs a significant expense based on the false belief that a contract exists. Based on the law of contracts she would have no legal basis to recover her damages because no contract exists.
In such a case, the injured party could make an appeal for justice under the legal concept of promissory estoppel.
In this case the court may consider providing remedy for an injury based on justice when the law provides no relief.
About the Legal Elements
With legal terminology it’s important to understand both the what and the why.
That is, you need to know both what the term means and why it’s important in the eyes of the law. Without understanding the why, you can miss the point even with a perfectly good definition in mind. That’s why Clear-Point Law has created a proprietary system for indexing legal terminology. We call it The Legal Elements.
The legal elements provide non-lawyers with a context for legal terms. These elements represent the key concepts of legal thinking and provide the answer to the question, why is this important. It doesn’t matter if the issue is criminality or contracts. For a description of all 12 Legal Elements, see our Overview of the Legal Elements.
Clear-Point Law Dictionary
