When is a legal system an "unjust" or "injust" system? Can you cite any historical examples?

Question

Not homework at age 56+

Answer 1

.   Current day Mexico.  Drug dealers openly pay judges 10 times their normal salary.  Police are paid so low that they can not support a family. They are easy targets for bribes and bribes are everywhere. See what happens when you get stopped for a traffic violation.

Answer 2

Here's a few things to consider for what I presume to be an essay:

1. A just legal system can contain unjust laws. For the system to unjust there must be more wrong with it than just having morally reprehensible laws. Every modern legal system has at least some morally reprehensible laws, but that doesn't make them unjust.

2. So, to be unjust there has to be something "wrong" with the system itself. There are two important common standards to consider here - the Rule of Law (the formal conception of it) and the principles of Natural Justice.

3. Consider the archetypes of unjust legal systems - n**i Germany, soviet Russia, and so on. They all violate parts of the above formal definitions of "good" legal systems. In both laws were made retrospectively, without proper promulgation, and most of all a great deal of arbitrary "justice" was dished out. Sometimes the courts system involved SS men as judges ( meaning that the prosecuting authority would also be the judge - Iudex in sua causa ).

4. There good reasons to consider these formal limits of a good system of law to be correct - practical as well as moral. note that their of the archetypes of bad legal system exist today, arguably for the ultimate reason that the philosophies behind their systems of government were flawed.