Introduction
Justice is not a static concept but an evolving social construct shaped by human consciousness, societal progress, and constitutional values. As societies evolve, a paradigm shift occurs from majoritarian or traditional social morality to progressive constitutional morality, rendering previously accepted practices obsolete or unjust.
Evolution of 'Just' and 'Unjust' across Temporal Contexts
Standards of justice change across historical, legal, and technological dimensions as societal awareness deepens:
- Historical and Social Justice: In ancient and medieval eras, hierarchical access to education based on caste or gender was socially legitimized. In contemporary India, Article 21A guarantees the Fundamental Right to Education for all children, recognizing discriminatory exclusion as fundamentally unjust.
- Legal and Gender Justice: For decades, the criminalisation of homosexuality under Section 377 and provisions criminalising adultery were defended as instruments of public morality and social order. In Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India and Joseph Shine v. Union of India, the Supreme Court struck down these outdated frameworks, affirming that individual autonomy, bodily integrity, and dignity supersede majoritarian conventions.
- Technological Justice: A decade ago, unrestricted commercial data harvesting operated largely without legal question. Following the landmark K.S. Puttaswamy verdict recognizing the Right to Privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21, unregulated surveillance and data commodification were acknowledged as unjust, leading to the enactment of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023.
Institutional Scrutiny to Prevent Miscarriage of Justice
Because societal values and material conditions shift continuously, governance and legal structures require ongoing review to prevent past conceptions of legality from producing modern injustices:
- Judicial Review and Public Interest Litigation (PIL): The higher judiciary acts as a continuous moral and constitutional compass, striking down outdated provisions or policies that fail modern tests of proportionality and transparency (e.g., striking down the Electoral Bonds Scheme to uphold democratic equality and transparency).
- Law Commission Recommendations: Periodic reviews by law reform bodies systematically identify and recommend the repeal of obsolete, colonial-era statutes that no longer conform to contemporary human rights standards.
- Legislative Sunset Clauses: Embedding automatic review periods into regulatory policies ensures that statutes are routinely reassessed against emerging ethical and socio-economic realities rather than enduring indefinitely in perpetuity.
Conclusion
As political philosopher John Rawls observed, justice is the first virtue of social institutions. Subjecting prevailing norms, laws, and administrative standards to continuous scrutiny through the prism of constitutionalism and welfare ethics ensures that institutions evolve progressively to uphold human dignity.