Justice & Law Quote by Sara Paretsky

Justice here isn’t blind so much as nearsighted, squinting hard at street crime while the real money slips quietly out the side door. Paretsky’s line works because it frames accountability as a mirage: “ever receding over the horizon” turns prosecution into a cruel optical trick. The closer you think you’re getting, the farther it seems to move. That’s not just pessimism; it’s an accusation about power’s ability to redesign the landscape.

As a crime novelist who built a career around institutional rot and gendered, corporate-backed impunity, Paretsky is speaking from inside a genre that usually promises resolution. Detective fiction is supposed to end with the reveal, the cuffs, the moral bookkeeping. By denying that catharsis, she’s exposing the bargain society makes: we treat “white-collar” crime as technical, bloodless, almost abstract, even when its consequences are eviction notices, denied medical care, unsafe products, and wrecked pensions. The “horizon” image suggests distance created by bureaucracy, legal complexity, and high-priced defense teams, but also by cultural deference - the persistent idea that respectable people commit “mistakes,” not crimes.

Contextually, the quote fits the late-20th-century arc of deregulation, corporate consolidation, and a political appetite for being “tough on crime” in ways that conveniently avoid executives. It’s a clean sentence with a dirty implication: the system isn’t failing at this; it’s functioning as designed, turning prosecution into pursuit geometry you were never meant to win.