Justice is conceptually configured as an institution, but can also be regarded as a specific process combining various principles and ideas from philosophy – understood in a Hegelian sense, as "a spiritual quintessence of the time". A process of justice includes various principles and elements, such as the conscience and morality of the legislator, the will of the citizens and the argumentative force of debates in the public sphere, the fight against political manipulation, the attempt to implement legitimate law and rights through authentic democratic processes, as well as the rigor and effectiveness of a legal system and the professionalism of legal actors. It culminates in the ideal requirement that each human subject be recognized by others according to his or her inherent equal value and that for everyone “suum quique tribuere”. As an element of political theory, justice can be seen as the key for the distribution of goods in a society. The reconciliation of liberty with equality (Rawls), has set the stage for a broader discussion of how we perceive society and the role of each individual.
The human community is the human society itself, expressed in collective associations, in social groups. Thus, to one degree or another, satisfaction is given to the constitutive need of the human being to be with others, to be a “zoon politikon” (Aristotle). The diversity in configurations of the human community is amazing: the family, caste, ethnic group, association, institution, people, state, nation, international organizations and more. With differing degrees of cohesion and solidarity depending on interests, values, norms and traditions, shared more or less consciously, the evolution of human communities in different historical periods is marked by persistence and ephemerality, stability and change, latent social questions, blurred issues or remarkable progress.
Freedom is seen in many different ways. It is often said to be a natural or divine trait of the human being, a cardinal social value and a major aspiration of the individual and of human communities across history, a perennial theme of the human condition. The perspectives of philosophy of law and social philosophy involve classical theses, such as autonomy and free will of the individual, as well as the correlation of freedoms by law (Kant). Self-conscious freedom is precisely the law that, by prohibition, defends the freedom of each of us (Hegel). Popular is also the assertion that there is no freedom where one is above the law because freedom ought not to destroy itself (Rousseau). The contemporary debates on the issue are extremely broad. This is marked by the types of discourse, the area of approach and the cultural context of these debates.
