On the problem of understanding justice as a legal category

The global and systemic crisis that modern civilization is going through makes it necessary to improve the efficiency of the functioning of both government bodies and legal systems, the activities of these bodies and their regulatory officials. Despite the strict observance of formal legality in the activities of officials, civil society may refuse to trust and support them if such activities are perceived as unfair. In public opinion, the fairness of the activities of representatives of the government, therefore, can be considered as a necessary condition for the legitimacy of their activities. This kind of circumstance necessitates the formalization of the concept of justice and the inclusion of this concept into the language of legal documents. At present, an unambiguous understanding of the category of “justice” in domestic jurisprudence has not yet been formed. The paper presents the author’s concept of justice in law, concludes that it is necessary to formalize and institutionalize this concept, to sort out the legal category of “justice” from the categories of the same name developed in other social and humanitarian sciences. The greatest attention is paid to the applicability of the concept of justice to the intersectoral institution of legal responsibility. It has been established that in the Russian Federation the requirement to ensure fairness in the activities of government bodies and officials has actually acquired a constitutional character. However, the use of this concept in the Constitution of the Russian Federation cannot be recognized as consistent, and justice as a whole has an ambiguous character. The content and correlation of this concept with other legal categories is analyzed. The study allows us to speak about the existence of a legal category of justice, which does not coincide with the understanding of this concept in other areas of scientific knowledge. It is concluded that the changes made to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, as one of their main goals, have an increase in fairness in the organization of public administration. The paper emphasizes the possibility to reveal the legal content of the concept of justice through the requirements to ensure verity, proportionality and impartiality in the activities of the government bodies.