Justice, Law, Order, and Morality

One of my favorite TV shows is Law and Order—the police procedural segment is interesting, but what truly hooks me is the trial segment, when the characters have to confront ethical issues of justice and law.  

Are law and justice the same thing? Clearly, in Part II we see some miscarriages of justice: the other defendants using Hanna as a scapegoat; the treatment of the trial as a "game" with rules; Hanna's inability to read the deposition and the pieces of evidence presented against her. And yet, these all fall within what is allowed by the Law. Does the Law, then, truly serve Justice?

What is true Justice? Is Justice related to Morality? If we use Kantian ethics to define Justice: would allowing a known murderer walk free because the witness lied be Moral? That seems to me a miscarriage of Justice.

And what is the purview of philosophy in Justice and Law anyway? When Hanna asked the judge what he would have done, the judge's answer was philosophical, was very Kantian. There are certain things that one just doesn't do, he says. And everyone is disappointed with this answer. Especially Hanna. She doesn't want to know what Philosophy has to say about her actions. It's too abstract, too distant, too divorced from her reality. She wants to know what she should have done in that exact moment, with the church on fire, her orders, her sense of duty (warped as it may have been), her surroundings, and her context.

Does the context of WWII make Hanna free from the guilt of listening to and watching the women burn to death and not freeing them? No. And yet, I know my answer to this question renders me somewhat of a hypocrite, because who knows how I would have acted in that situation. Is that why the judge is always so irritated by Hanna? Is it because he knows that in judging Hanna he is also judging himself and what he might have done?

Who are we to judge? Are we not just as fallible and mortal as Hanna?

And yet, some Justice MUST be served. Because the Holocaust was an atrocity on a scale that exceeds all our human comprehension, an atrocity that exposes the horrifying darkness of humanity, an atrocity that allowed human beings to be treated as objects, test animals, mere things.

But this justice that is meted, is it true Justice?