Source: Liberalism.org
by Michael Burger
“Rules of law can never always produce justice. That’s because life really is complicated. The facts that pertain to doing true justice are unpredictable. Inevitably, even the best-designed rules of law will sometimes get it wrong, with unjust results. When that happens, the law will be an ass. So in a perfectly just world we need sometimes to ignore rules of law. We need a government, or at least agents of government (in other words, judges) who will take into account all of the truly pertinent facts, not just the facts that rules of law say are pertinent. We need a government, in other words, that is not bound by the law, to really deliver justice in a way that the law cannot. Now medieval intellectuals had a term for a ruler unbound by law: a tyrant.” (11/05/26)
https://liberalism.org/essays/the-rule-of-law-will-sometimes-be-unjust-defend-it-anyway