The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of justice understood as a virtue to law and public policy. Is justice adequately understood in terms of virtue, or does the former also include certain rules—or laws—which constitute criteria of justice in human community? If the concept of justice includes the notion of rules as well as virtue, how are the two ideas related? At a more fundamental level, is justice, indeed, a viable concept in modern, pluralistic society?

In an effort to explore these questions we turn, first, to three contemporary ethicists who have attempted to ground morality in public life fundamentally upon the notion of virtue. The first of these writers—Alasdair MacIntyre—is a philosopher; the remaining two—Stanley Hauerwas and James M. Gustafson—are theologians. While each is deeply influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, all three fail to give adequate attention to the relation of justice conceived as a virtue to law in the latter, particularly in Aquinas. The ensuing section of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the structures of justice as a requirement of collective forms of human life. Consideration of the structures of justice leads, in turn, to the question of the relationship of justice to law. Finally, it is argued that, from a theological perspective, justice is most adequately understood as a form of covenant and that the ultimate norm of justice is reconciling love. Justice is a human task which aims finally at the reconciliation of broken community and the achievement of new forms or levels of the common good.

The highly publicized cases of Indiana's Infant Doe, Tennessee's Pamela Hamilton, New York's Baby Jane Doe, and California's Elizabeth Bouvia raise a series of questions about the proper relations of legal, medical, and moral expertise in our society which are being forced upon us with increasing urgency. Indeed, the daily papers, radio, and television news and special reports flood us with instances of pressing moral dilemmas being played out in courtrooms before bevies of expert witnesses on both sides of issues which only a generation ago would have been virtually unheard of (e.g., genetic counseling and engineering, organ donation and transplantation, the use and abuse of life-sustaining technologies, and so forth). In this article I wish to explore several of the legal, medical, and moral ambiguities surrounding these proceedings by focusing on the first two cases mentioned above.