He has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you but to act justly,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6: 8 BSB.
Justice, Woven Through Us
When I was young—long before I could articulate why—I had a deep instinct for justice. Not just the punitive kind, but something gentler, older, more beautiful: the kind that rights wrongs not by vengeance but by restoring balance, by lifting the bowed head, by speaking truth softly but firmly into the world. It was around that time that I came across a passage from the English jurist William Blackstone, whose name still lingers with quiet gravity in the history of law.
He wrote:
“The Creator has so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former.”
—William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 1, Section 2
That struck me with force. I didn’t understand it in full then, but something in me responded. It was as though he’d named what I had already begun to feel—that justice is not an external code imposed from above, but something woven into us. A thread of divine order stitched through our conscience and joy, reminding us that real happiness cannot be had without honouring what is right.
That quote stayed with me for decades. Through my own experiences of injustice and mercy, through times when I failed to act justly, and through moments when I was on the receiving end of kindness that tilted the scales in my favour.
I’m lying on top of the bed now, under the weight of cancer and the flu. The body is aching, but the spirit still listens. I’ve been moved this morning by the reflections of the Scottish Judge, Rita Rae on the BBCs Desert Island Discs. Her justice rings with the same conviction Blackstone voiced centuries earlier. Her stories of courtroom moments and moral insights into justice reminded me again that justice is never just about rules or verdicts—it’s about people. Broken, hopeful, sometimes guilty people. People who need to be seen with both clarity and compassion like the man whose acquittal changed his life as he moved on an academic career
Perhaps that’s what Blackstone meant. That justice, insight and compassion are not strangers. That one leads to the other, like daylight following the turning of the earth. And maybe that’s why it moved me so deeply as a boy: because justice, when it’s real, feels like the world being mended.
Desert Island Discs - Rita Rae, Lady Rae, lawyer and judge - BBC Sounds
