English 1A
Professor Wills
Justice
The Statue of Lady Justice is often placed in front of a courthouse. Lady Justice has often been described wearing a blindfold and holding a scale and a sword. The blindfold represents that justice is measured without favor or identity. The balance represents fairness and equality. The sword represents punishment. Lady Justice symbolizes that all people are equal in the eyes of the law. Some people wonder what is justice and who makes the laws of justice. People develop their concept of justice according to their cultural influences and personal experiences which help them to form their concepts on what is right and wrong.
In order to perform a just law everyone should be equal. In John Rawls …show more content…
In the United States, women and African Americans have benefitted from these changes. They were treated as slaves back then. They had no rights to vote or even receive the most basic equivalences in daily life. For example, women or African Americans were not allowed to sit in certain sections of the bus. They had to give up their places in line to a white person or a man. In Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King pointed out that “A just law is a code that is majority compels a minority to follow and that is willing to follow itself.” (219) King broke the so called just law because he thought the law was unjust and got arrested. I agree with King’s idea because I think people form a rubric for what is right and wrong which the majority of people approve of, and those minorities of people who are willing to stay in the society have to follow the majority in order to maintain the harmony of the society. But sometimes these laws can be unjust. For example, most people agree that killing or hurting another person is wrong and not allowed, therefore, a law of justice then is created that anyone who kills and hurts another person will be punished. On the other hand, when a person hurts another person in self-defense he or she will not be punished as critical as the first example. But how do we know that killing another person intentionally is