The Problem of Friction: Why Procedural Justice Breaks in the Real World

There’s another, deeper reason why proceduralism—the Rawlsian kind in particular—isn’t just wrong in principle but dangerous in practice.

You’ve heard the saying: No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Or in business: No business plan survives the first day in business. The point, of course, is that reality has a way of steamrolling even the most elegant designs. Unpredictable contingencies—what Clausewitz called “friction”—inevitably arise, and systems that can’t flex, fail.

Now imagine a justice system built entirely on proceduralism. The judge doesn’t ask what’s right. He asks whether the rules were followed. There is no override, no “get real” clause. There is only the machinery of the system, ticking along as if moral reality were a mere detail.

Unless that system is perfect—which it never is—it’s going to malfunction. Maybe not catastrophically every time, but certainly and inevitably in specific cases. That’s not speculation. That’s statistical certainty.

If the rules don't allow for real-time discretion, they will produce injustices—not because anyone is cheating or being malicious, but because the rules themselves cannot anticipate the infinite complexity of real life. The world is full of edge cases, exceptions, flukes, and tragedies. A system that cannot respond to them is not a justice system. It’s a meat grinder.

To be clear: procedures matter. Scalability demands them. A purely intuitive or discretionary legal system cannot function at the scale of a modern nation-state. But there must be a built-in recognition of their limits. There must be space within the architecture of justice for judgment—for the reality that fairness sometimes means breaking the rules when the rules, by accident or design, are about to crush someone unjustly.

Rawlsian proceduralism has no such provision. It imagines a world where if you design the game correctly at the outset—under a veil of ignorance—everything else will work out. But real life is not a simulation. It’s chaos interrupted briefly by structure. And if your structure can’t accommodate that chaos, it will eventually become indistinguishable from injustice.

Procedural justice, without substantive override, is like a self-driving car with no steering wheel: it works beautifully—until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, someone gets run over.