Individual Liberty or Social Justice? Reconciling Theories of Justice with the Institutional Design of Liberal Public Law

Abstract

The theoretical tradition of justice within the liberal discourse has persistently sought to reconcile the commitment to negative liberty with the imperatives of institutional justice. This endeavor has produced diverse interpretations of the relationship between the individual, the state, and public authority—from libertarian advocacy of the minimal state to theories such as Rawls’ “justice as fairness” and Sen’s “capability approach,” which call for a normative reconstruction of state functions to ensure equitable conditions. Nevertheless, the question of whether justice can be realized within the institutional framework of a minimal state remains one of the most intricate conceptual fault lines in contemporary public law. This study, grounded in the conceptual framework of liberal theories of justice and through a comparative analysis of institutional experiences in the United States and the United Kingdom, explores the mechanisms by which institutional and distributive justice might be actualized within the constraints of a limited state model. The analysis reveals that the core challenge lies not in the scale of state power but in the quality of its institutional architecture—where the reduction of justice to a merely negative conception results in the suspension of the solidaristic function of public authority. The principal contribution of this research is to demonstrate that a minimal state, when guided by justice-oriented rationality and embedded in intelligent institutional design, not only does not contradict justice but may provide novel avenues for its realization. Conducted through a descriptive-analytical method, this study offers a conceptual horizon for reconciling liberty and justice within the architecture of contemporary liberal public law.