President Lincoln's thoughts on Justice and the Duty of Government

[David Lockmiller]

Former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Paul Stevens (1975 - 2010) wrote in the epilogue to his book Five Chiefs - A Supreme Court Memoir (2011) on this subject of "Justice and the Duty of Government" as follows:

The text of the Constitution does not mention the word dignity or the word sovereignty. It does, however, state in its preamble that one of its purposes was to "establish justice." The term justice is not defined in either the Constitution itself or in any federal statute of which I am aware. I shall therefore conclude by referring to two quite different ways of thinking about the idea of justice that are both described in Plato's Republic.

A serene and elderly gentleman name Cephalus accepted Socrates' suggestion that justice consisted of speaking the truth and paying one's debts, whereas Thrasymachus, a younger and more belligerent antagonist, proclaimed that "justice is nothing more than the interest of the stronger." Presumably the senior citizen would require a ruler to tell the truth and to pay its debts. For Thrasymachus, however, whenever it was in a sovereign's interest to rely on sovereign dignity as a reason for refusing to obey the law, it would be just for him to do so.

An Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln shared Cephalus's thoughts about justice and my views about sovereign immunity. In his State of the Union message of 1861, he said: "It is as much the duty of Government to render prompt justice against itself, in favor of its citizens, as it is to administer the same between private individuals." (Emphasis added.)