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. This paper operationalizes two constructs — materialized justice, whether an alleged violation reaches a binding determination, and intra-systemic justice, how well the process is conducted while underway — and argues that the gap between them is architectural: 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.