Definition
The withholding or denial of justice. In legal usage, the term refers almost exclusively to an act, fault, or omission of a court — a narrower and more procedural meaning than the word carries in ordinary discourse. Where the common language sense encompasses any unfair or wrongful treatment by any actor, the legal sense attaches specifically to judicial conduct or failure: a court's refusal to hear a claim, an erroneous ruling that deprives a party of a lawful remedy, or procedural failures that prevent the vindication of legal rights.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A condition or instance of being treated unjustly; unfairness; the opposite of justice.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Want of justice and equity; violation of the rights of another or others; iniquity; wrong; unfairness; imposition. Also, an unjust act or deed; a sin; a crime; a wrong.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant and directional. In ordinary usage — both modern and historical — injustice can be committed by anyone: a neighbor, an employer, a government, a mob. In legal usage, the term is applied with near-exclusivity to courts and judicial actors. A legislature that passes an oppressive law, or an executive that abuses power, may produce injustice in the moral sense; legal dictionaries do not treat those as injustice in the technical sense. Researchers who encounter the word in legal sources should read it as a term of art pointing toward judicial conduct specifically.
Common Confusion
INJUSTICE vs. WRONG vs. INJURY: These three terms are sometimes used interchangeably in older legal writing but carry distinct meanings. An injury (injuria) is a legally cognizable harm to a right. A wrong is an act violating a legal duty. Injustice, in legal usage, is the failure of the judicial system itself to correct wrongs or remedy injuries — it describes a systemic or procedural failure rather than the underlying act that caused harm. In historical sources, particularly pre-20th century equity opinions, the terms blur. Read with care.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational trap in corpus research. Because injustice carries such broad moral and rhetorical weight in common language, it appears frequently in legal writing in two very different registers: (1) as a technical descriptor of judicial failure or denial of access to courts, and (2) as rhetorical flourish in advocacy, judicial opinions, and dissents where the author means nothing more precise than "this result is wrong." Distinguishing between these uses requires reading for context.
In historical sources — particularly 19th century equity opinions and early constitutional law — injustice often appears in the phrase "prevent injustice" or "avoid injustice" as a grounds for equitable intervention. There, the term is doing real legal work: courts of equity claimed jurisdiction precisely because courts of law had produced, or threatened to produce, injustice in the technical sense. Researchers mining equity doctrine should treat this usage as a jurisdictional marker.
The Anderson's Dictionary of Law entry cross-references JUSTICE rather than defining injustice independently, which is itself instructive: the historical legal dictionaries treat injustice as a derivative concept, intelligible only through its positive counterpart. Researchers should follow that cross-reference and read the two entries together.
Because the term is not a cause of action, a standard of review, or a defined element of any doctrine, it does not generate its own line of cases in the way that technical terms do. It appears more commonly in the reasoning sections of opinions than in holdings, and more commonly in dissents and equity cases than in legal rulings at common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the most precise legal definition: "The withholding or denial of justice," qualified immediately by the observation that in law the term is "almost invariably applied to the act, fault, or omission of a court." This is a narrow and deliberate formulation. The cases cited in Black's cluster around a recognizable set of concerns — procedural failures, denials of access, and errors that leave parties without remedy — consistent with that judicial focus.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law declines to define the term independently, redirecting readers to JUSTICE. This reflects a broader pattern in 19th century legal lexicography: compilers treated negative formulations (injustice, illegal, inequitable) as semantically dependent on their positive counterparts rather than as freestanding concepts. Researchers working with Anderson's should not interpret the cross-reference as a signal that injustice was considered unimportant; it reflects the organizational conventions of the period.
Neither source engages with the moral or political philosophy dimensions of the term. The legal dictionaries strip injustice down to institutional failure and leave the broader normative content to rhetoric. That narrowing is itself historically significant: it reflects the positivist tendency in late 19th century Anglo-American legal thought to confine legal vocabulary to actionable or judicially cognizable concepts.