The Structural Scarcity of Materialized Justice

Abstract

States declare justice for all, but no jurisdiction's own statistics allow that promise to be checked directly against what actually happens. This paper takes the promise on its own terms and translates it into two operational constructs: materialized justice, whether the State's response to an alleged violation reaches a binding determination, and intra-systemic justice, how well that response is conducted while underway. Through one philosophical proposition, three definitional propositions, and three falsifiable propositions, the paper argues that the resulting gap is architectural rather than contingent: a centralized, finite, reactive State cannot filter allegations before spending the resources that would let it discriminate a genuine violation from none at all. A critical test in Denmark, Norway, and Finland—the world's highest-scoring rule-of-law systems—finds the predicted gap present, with varying strength, in all three, corroborating the thesis without proving it.