Justice & Law Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy frames justice as a verb, not a courtroom ideal, and that shift is the whole provocation. “There is no justice we don’t make” refuses the comforting idea that fairness arrives from on high - from laws, leaders, or the slow moral arc people like to outsource their conscience to. Justice, in her syntax, is handmade. It exists only insofar as people produce it.

The domestic similes do the quiet radical work. “Daily like bread and love” drags justice out of marble monuments and into kitchens, caretaking, mutual aid, and the repetitive labor we’re trained to dismiss as private. Bread is basic, sustaining, and never permanently “done”; you bake it again or you go hungry. Love, too, is not a mood but maintenance - attention, repair, the unglamorous practice of showing up. By pairing justice with these, Piercy argues it’s not episodic (a protest, a verdict, an election) but habitual: a routine of redistribution, protection, and refusal.

The subtext is a critique of passive morality. If justice must be made daily, then neglect is not neutral; it’s a choice that lets injustice keep reproducing itself. The line also carries feminist and left political context typical of Piercy’s work: the insistence that the “small” sphere - caregiving, community, domestic labor - is where power is either challenged or cemented.

It works because it’s both tender and demanding: justice isn’t grandiose, but it is nonstop. The metaphor gives you comfort (bread, love) and then denies you rest.