Beyond the veil of ignorance
Click on almost any article about the justice system, or step into just about any higher court of law, and you’re bound to see the same image: a blindfolded woman, holding a pair of scales in her outstretched hand. Lady Justice (Iustitia if you’re an Ancient Roman, Themis or Dike if you’re an Ancient Greek) has come to represent many of our common-sense intuitions about what justice is, or should be: impartial, balanced – in a word, fair.
Indeed, the ubiquity of this image suggests that the link between justice and fairness is uncontroversial. But that belies a long-running suspicion that justice is nothing more than a game run by the powerful to subjugate the rest
