PEERLESS INN Vs. FIRST INDUSTRIAL TRIBUNAL & ORS

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live. The importance of human lives, experiences and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate. Institutions and rules are, of course, very important in influencing what happens, and they are part and parcel of the actual world as well, but the realized actuality goes well beyond the organizational picture, and includes the lives that people manage - or do not manage - to live. Amartya Sen-The Idea of Justice (Penguin Books, 2010) p. 18

(2.) Prof. Ronald Dworkin tells us an excellent anecdote about Justice Oliver Wendell Holms in his celebrated treatise Justice in Robes (2nd Indian Reprint, 2010). Justice Holms of the U.S. Supreme Court gave a young Learned Hand a lift in his carriage. When the Hand had got out at his destination, waved after the departing carriage and called out merrily, "do justice, Justice!" Holms stopped the cab, made the driver turn around and rode back to the astonished Hand and cried out, "that's not my job!". Dworkin wryly commented that the carriage turned out and departed, taking Holms back to his job of allegedly not doing justice. (p.1)

(3.) Obviously, a dichotomy was used when Justice Holms had given reply a distinction between Justice per se and Law. In a larger sense the first encompasses the second but in the narrower sense there has been a persistent tendency to segregate and compartmentalize the two in their respective domains of functioning among judges, the lawyers, sociologists and the political theorists.