Law And Justice Case Study

In order to understand why D’Amato thinks Alice should be exempt from her fine of $50 we need to understand his concepts of the relationship between law and justice. To begin we must remember that the purpose of the rule of law in the first place is to control and compensate for human error in a general form. In doing so we recognize that people are going to break the laws and there will be repercussions for doing so. However, because humans are complicated there is not a formulated response to the outcomes. There are several factors that play into the end product of punishment. It’s not as simple as, everyone that breaks law x is punished with a charge of y. It is for this reason that D’Amato says humans make such decisions and not computers.

This is when it serves us right to allow judgment to be in the hands of other humans and not computers because a computer would not be able to factor in the fact that Alice would have broken a law regardless of what she had done. In her case it was a question of which was the lesser of two evils. If she had followed the traffic laws she would have been guilty of manslaughter. Because we are human and naturally empathetic we can’t rule without an underline motive to achieve justice. It is because of this that justice naturally compensates for the limitations law is faced with. For this reason law and justice have a checks and balance kind of a relationship. Without law you don’t have solid evidence to build a case on and without justice you have no leeway to interpret the exceptions to human error. D’Amato puts it this way, saying “the legal system is a system of the application of justice to human conflicts…a court cannot simply apply ‘justice’ without law, because the law- the full panoply of rules, statutes, and precedents- is part of the facts of the parties’ situation” (36). With this being said, we come to the conclusion that due to the complicated nature of the world we live in and the general rules in which we are ruled under Alice should not have to pay the fine of $50 because in this case justice compensates for the application