Justice

“Justice” is an installation: a laboratory balance, one pan piled with weights, the other holding only the smallest. The beam tilts; the red pointer, fixed at zero, reads “balanced.” Only the part you are meant to read has been tampered with, its answer set before anything was put on the pans. Visitors may load, empty and swap the pans as they like. The beam tips again and again; the pointer never does. In the end, all you can do is take your hands away. For Judith Shklar, justice gets written down as a fixed model; whatever injustice does not fit is filed under misfortune. The victim’s own sense of injustice is what the model fails to register. The beam is that sense; the pointer, that model. Nothing is weighed. We asked for justice and were given a reading. False justice need not hide the imbalance; it can leave it in full view and still read zero. “Justice” leaves you at the balance with the weight you put there and a pointer that never answers.