What would a just justice system look like?

This chapter explores the challenges, pitfalls and possibilities for the delivery of justice in the twenty-first century. It offers a brief overview of the cases, analyses the spectre of the victim they each generated, and discusses the relationship between this spectre and the changing nature of the wider political and cultural context in which this has emerged. The chapter focuses on the logic underpinning the response to these cases and explores the concept of risk as the motif informing contemporary victim-informed justice responses. It explores the shift in the deployment of risk in clinical to actuarial to algorithmic justice, and comments on both the progressive and regressive potentialities embedded in the latter. For liberal democracies, adherence to the principles of justice and the delivery of those principles are seen to be a ‘public good’, that is, something ‘irreducibly social’ and in the collective interests of society as a whole.