There can't be, because there is irremovable subjectivity in your definition of legal justice: "equally and fairly" are subjective, and so is "wrongfully take advantage". There is no way to write an objective rule that will handle every case. You have to apply human judgment to each individual case, and human judgment will always be subjective. Written laws attempt to set down objective rules, but such attempts will never completely succeed.
One doesn’t need to invoke platonic forms to assert that equality and fairness do exist as objective moral values and duties.
I agree that applying them in particular cases is inescapably subjective since judges are subject to human limitations. But in doing so, one ought to strive for objectivity as much as possible.
A good ruling is good insofar as it was able to preserve, despite the judge’s human limitations, fidelity to the law and to legal justice.
> One doesn’t need to invoke platonic forms to assert that equality and fairness do exist as objective moral values and duties.
No, but one does have to have some objective way to test for them. And there isn't any. Ultimately, every person has to judge for themselves what does and does not count as equality and fairness.
> one does have to have some objective way to test for them
I disagree. Just because a fully objective test is impracticable doesn’t mean the ideal doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be taught or strived toward—or that objective values and duties don’t exist.
Beyond that, appeals courts exist as a check on injustice in lower court rulings. They do try to objectively verify whether a given ruling was just.
Yes, individuals do have to “judge for themselves”, but there are objective standards to apply and evaluate decisions by, even if those standards can only be intuitively defined.
> appeals courts exist as a check on injustice in lower court rulings. They do try to objectively verify whether a given ruling was just.
You evidently haven't read many appeals court opinions or looked at the actual rules for when a case can be appealed at all. Those rules have little if anything to do with whether the ruling was just. They mostly have to do with whether particular procedural rules were followed. As for the actual opinions and rulings issued by appeals courts, after reading many of them, the only clear pattern I can see is that judges start out already knowing what result they want and simply find appropriate laws and precedents to justify it; since the body of law and precedents, taken as a whole, is mutually inconsistent, it is easy to find a justification for any position you like.
I have no doubt you're right. I have read through several appeals court rulings, but they all ruled on the merits (if they didn't I stopped reading, haha).
Guess I'm speaking more about what I believe is the ideal.
> there are objective standards to apply and evaluate decisions by, even if those standards can only be intuitively defined
To me this is a contradiction in terms: "only intuitively defined" means human intuition, i.e., subjectivity, is involved. I guess we'll just have to disagree.
I think it's more of an acknowledgment that Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to any system of reasoning or knowledge. Even known true statements can't be proved all the way down --- at some point they have to rest on axioms that are assumed (or taken on faith).
We could take it a step further and discuss what establishes objective moral values and duties, but that plants us firmly in a discussion centering around worldviews and their truth/falsehood.
All to say, I believe there is an objectively true worldview upon which objective moral values and duties rest, upon which an objective jurisprudence can rest, upon which good (though inescapably subjective) judicial opinions can be issued. Maybe I'm being overly pedantic, but I'm frustrated with what seems an intentional departure from objectivity (and an originalist jurisprudence to boot) as the goal in certain circles.
> I think it's more of an acknowledgment that Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to any system of reasoning or knowledge
Godel's theorem is a limitation on any system of formal rules, but it's not the limitation I'm talking about.
> Even known true statements can't be proved all the way down --- at some point they have to rest on axioms that are assumed (or taken on faith).
This is a different limitation from Godel's theorem, but it's also not quite the limitation I'm talking about (though I think it's related to it--see below).
> I believe there is an objectively true worldview upon which objective moral values and duties rest
This is the limitation I'm talking about. Even if you have an objectively true view of the world, moral values and duties aren't just about the way the world is; they're about the way humans want the world to be. And human wants are subjective; if you and I disagree about how we want the world to be, there is no objective way to resolve our disagreement.
There can't be, because there is irremovable subjectivity in your definition of legal justice: "equally and fairly" are subjective, and so is "wrongfully take advantage". There is no way to write an objective rule that will handle every case. You have to apply human judgment to each individual case, and human judgment will always be subjective. Written laws attempt to set down objective rules, but such attempts will never completely succeed.