# Transcript

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SPEAKER:
It's often said that justice is blind. But what exactly is justice? We've all seen the image of the goddess Themis with her blindfold and scales symbolizing the ancient Greeks' idealized view of justice. And it was the Greeks who developed the first concepts of justice, with Aristotle distinguishing between distributive and corrective justice as far back as the 4th century BC.
Distributive justice is about ensuring fairness and equality. Its focus is on treating individuals equally when dishing out things like rights, goods, and well-being amongst people. Corrective justice, on the other hand, is about ensuring people receive their just desserts, whether that's punishment for crimes committed or reparation for harm suffered.
Later, in ancient Rome, the philosopher Cicero and others took a different approach to justice. They argued that basic legal principles and rights are derived from nature. This idea forms the basis of what's still known today as natural justice. It includes the principles of a fair trial and avoiding bias in judicial decisions. These perspectives still influence our ideas of justice today, though other, more practical perspectives have also become more important.
Formal justice is based on the idea that laws, judges, and the system overall should be inherently fair and unbiased. From this perspective, different people in the same or similar situations should be treated equally. This sense of fairness applies not just to the formal aspects of justice, but also to laws and regulations within society, such as health and safety planning and financial services.
Substantive justice is about ensuring that the content of the law created by parliaments and interpreted by the courts is fair and just. Here, social and contextual factors, such as culture, history, and moral attitudes, are paramount.
So while we might agree that justice should be blind, we must also remember that justice can be understood in different ways by different people.

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