Justice is What You Can Afford.

By: Christine E. Ohenewah, J.D. | April 7, 2025

Listen to Audio. Narrated by Christine E. Ohenewah.Justice Is What You Can Afford.

0:00

Christine E. Ohenewah is a Lawyer and Public Intellectual in pursuit of empowering minds. She is a former White Collar Investigations Associate and graduate of Cornell Law School, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Macalester College. With interests in Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Socio-Legal Theory, Miss Ohenewah is an active writer and commentator whose interdisciplinary work both engages with and challenges traditional perspectives on law, power, and society. She serves as a faculty member at multiple institutions, teaching courses in Law and Ethics, Sociology, and Criminology.

Often, I say that the law and justice have little, if anything, to do with one another.

Why? For the mere fact that justice appears differently to each party involved. Justice for the perpetrator seldom bears the same resemblance to justice for the victim. What the law states, how the law is interpreted, and how the law is enforced may wildly diverge from what equitable notions of justice would dictate.

The law is a science. Justice is an ideal. Neither are perfect. Each can both enhance and invalidate the other.

Laws codified by statute are of course subject to individual interpretation, but they still bear the power of being memorialized in ink while embodying the presumption of a universal standard.

Justice, on the other hand, is ever fluid, ever subjective, and ever beholden to the era in which it sits. Justice is birthed from shocks to collective consciousness. Shocks to collective consciousness are birthed by societal determinations of morality: the good, the bad, and the neutral. These shocks are arguably the “jus cogens,” if you will, of local relations, and they govern everyday human interactions of a society.

In one society, murder may not be perceived as horrid. In another society, theft may be punishable by death. Justice, then, as it were, follows discreet rubrics of moral perception. In effect, dependent on the moment in time and the geography in question, justice may mean everything—or nothing at all—depending on who is asking and when.

I would push the envelope further to say that justice is expensive. Justice is what you can afford.

The bleak reality is that anyone can know and cite the law to their satisfaction. Not everyone can afford justice. Not everyone is willing to pay for justice, whether it is with their financial capital, their political capital, or their blood, sweat, and teardrops. Justice becomes an option and not a necessity when offense to one's senses does not reach the pivotal threshold needed to incite unapologetic action.

However, those who understand the meaning of their power and survival treat justice as if their own breath has been purged from their respiratory system: justice is paramount. And when justice is paramount, the parameters of the law lose meaning.

The chasm between law and justice demands introspection around our assumptions about both. We must address the reality that justice does not descend naturally from legal mechanisms—it demands fervent advocacy, resources, and persistent struggle. We are therefore called to build a conscious architecture of justice that is designed with intention and maintained with vigilance.

*Originally written in September of 2024. Revised in April of 2025.

Subscribe on LinkedIn.

Subscribe on YouTube.

Subscribe on Substack.