Rawls, Norm-Compliance, and the Ugly Side of Liberal Justice

I’ve been reflecting on a theme that cuts deep into both legal and political philosophy: the idea that law isn’t about discovering truth—it’s about complying with norms. That idea, which I’ve seen play out personally in legal disputes, courtrooms, and endless hours with lawyers, doesn’t just describe how law works; it reveals something bigger. Something philosophical. Something Rawlsian.

I’m not saying John Rawls invented this outlook. He didn’t. But his now-canonical Theory of Justice seems to validate and formalize this mindset—the idea that justice isn’t about what’s true or good, but about following procedures fairly. And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a legal system built around that kind of proceduralism, you know how cold and grotesque the results can be.

🔹 Justice Without Truth

In Rawls’s scheme, justice isn’t a matter of discovering moral truths. It’s about what rational agents would choose if they were behind a veil of ignorance, unaware of their class, race, gender, or talents. The idea is to produce principles of justice that are fair because they’re chosen without self-interest.

Sounds decent—until you realize what’s missing:

• No consideration of actual human psychology.

• No reference to how people behave under real constraints.

• No engagement with history, power, trauma, or empirical data of any kind.

It’s a procedural hallucination.

And that’s exactly what law can feel like when you’re immersed in it. The judge doesn’t care what happened. The lawyers don’t care what’s right. They care whether the correct boxes were checked. Rawls gives that whole system a patina of philosophical legitimacy. His vision of justice is one where procedure substitutes for moral clarity.

🔹 Legal Realism and Rawls: Strange Bedfellows?

This makes for a strange alignment between Rawlsian liberalism and a certain strand of legal realism—not the radical kind that says law doesn’t exist, but the more pragmatic kind that sees law as a system of constrained procedures and norms, rather than a vehicle for truth.

Both Rawls and legal proceduralism take comfort in fair structures rather than correct outcomes. And both treat legitimacy as a matter of rule-following, not truth-seeking.

That might work fine in the faculty lounge.

It doesn’t work when your freedom, your livelihood, or your family is on the line.

🔹 The Price of Moral Formalism

What’s striking is how morally disengaged all of this feels. Whether you’re reading Rawls or watching lawyers in court, you get the sense that justice isn’t something we know, or feel, or grasp—it’s something we construct procedurally and enforce bureaucratically. And if the result is unjust in any intuitive sense? Too bad. The system worked.

This is why I say there’s something ugly at the heart of liberal proceduralism. Not because it's intentionally cruel. But because it's so committed to neutrality, it becomes indifferent.

It’s not that Rawls wants injustice. It’s that he’s structurally incapable of seeing it if it arises from a procedurally fair system. And that mindset has trickled into how courts operate, how law is taught, and how entire classes of professionals learn to shut their eyes to the world while proudly declaring that “justice has been done.”

Justice without truth is no justice at all. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Rawls. Or from watching the average courtroom in action.