The Death of Justice

In a word, judicial technique implies that bureaucracy cannot be burdened any longer with justice...in all of twentieth-century Western civilization, the concept of order and security is substituted for justice as the end and foundation of law when judicial technique becomes sufficiently developed.

The formula then becomes: “Better injustice than disorder.” The notions of order and security are at least as easily reduced to technique as is the impossible notion of justice. One knows exactly what measures must be taken to achieve order. The definition of order may vary, but the means are always the same. One knows and is in a position to specify the conditions of legal security. Even though these means imply injustice, it is impossible to object, in view of the changeable character of the concept of justice. The more explicit judicial technique becomes, the more the law tends to ensure order. This is, moreover, one of the major objectives of the state. Therefore, the law and the police become identical, for the law is no longer anything but an instrument of the state.

-Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society