Law and justice in the society of economic inequality

In a comprehensive analysis of the concept of legal culture, legal systems are influenced by the impact of social forces and are constantly shifting and transforming. In the socio-legal perspective, the law reflects the morphology of existing social relations. If it is true that today’s society is characterized by forms of increasing economic inequality, then the parallel crisis of the modern state determines the weakening of the forms of intervention aimed at reducing inequalities in view of the realization of equality and social justice. In the modern age, the legitimate forms of intervention have been realized through state law, and collective decisions have been the result of democratic procedures within individual states. Thus today, there is a tendency to replace the classic parameter of social justice with that of efficiency, especially as far as public administration actions are concerned, while forms of social reaction to the growth of inequality seem to be absent in a situation that Rosanvallon called “schizophrenic” (Rosanvallon, 2013). Yet according to Piketty at a given stage of development of the economy and productive forces, there is a multiplicity of ideological and political regimes and therefore of inequalities (Piketty, 2019). However, the law has so far shown a certain weakness with respect to the economy: through a process of “juridification”, the juridical space has been used as an “infrastructure” to instrumentally spread the economic method. The law therefore ends up renouncing the fight against social inequality, if not actually favouring it by adopting the existing social asymmetries in a context of widening economic inequality. The law therefore risks being the product of a society in which political power does not exist by itself but is only a function of economic power.