When The Letter Betrays The Law: Between Legal Certainty And The Spirit Of Justice

Abstract

Legal systems promise two goods that do not always travel together: certainty, the assurance that rules mean what they say and will be applied as written, and justice, the substantive fairness that rules are meant to serve. This paper examines the recurring jurisprudential crisis that arises when strict adherence to statutory text produces outcomes that offend the purposes the law was enacted to achieve. Drawing on the positivist tradition of Kelsen and Hart, the equity tradition traced to Aristotle, Gustav Radbruch's post-war reappraisal of statutory positivism, and the Hart–Fuller debate, the paper maps the theoretical terrain on which formalism and purposivism contend. It then examines landmark and illustrative cases in which literal interpretation collided with substantive justice, including Riggs v. Palmer, the English "golden rule" cases, the jurisprudence of the Radbruch formula in post-1945 German courts, and the Indian Supreme Court's own oscillation between literalism and purposivism across ADM Jabalpur, Maneka Gandhi, Kesavananda Bharati, Vishaka, and Navtej Singh Johar. The paper argues that neither pure formalism nor unconstrained judicial equity is defensible, and proposes a disciplined model of purposive interpretation, bounded by reasoned justification, precedent, and institutional review, as the most stable reconciliation of legal certainty with the spirit of justice.