Justice & Law Quote by William Gaddis

Gaddis’s line lands like a door slamming in a courtroom corridor: stop expecting moral balance from a system built for procedure. The bite is in the first word, “Justice?” a scoffing reroute that turns a lofty ideal into a naïve question. Then comes the pivot: justice is deferred to “the next world,” a phrase that borrows the consolations of religion only to weaponize them. Believe in cosmic fairness if you need to sleep; here, on earth, you’re getting paperwork, precedent, and power.

The subtext is classic Gaddis: institutions don’t fail accidentally, they succeed at their real purpose. “The law” isn’t portrayed as justice’s imperfect cousin; it’s an entirely different creature. Law is a technology of order, a language game with winners, loopholes, and specialists who know how to speak it. Justice is what people want the law to be, a moral narrative that makes punishment feel cleansing and outcomes feel deserved. Gaddis punctures that narrative by reminding us the law is an instrument, not a conscience.

Context matters: Gaddis wrote in a postwar America that increasingly trusted systems - corporate, bureaucratic, legal - even as those systems proved adept at laundering responsibility. His fiction is crowded with voices, contracts, disputes, and bad faith performances of legitimacy. This line distills that whole worldview into one grim joke: if you’re waiting for the world to be fair, you’ve already lost your case.