In any case, the concept of justice affirmed by Hart is that of a species of moral standard thatenjoins some form of equality (or, perhaps, proportionality) in the allocation of benefits andburdens among a class of individuals. It is the focus on the treatment of classes of individuals,rather than on individual conduct as such, that explains the special relevance of justice to theevaluation of legal institutions (p.167). So understood, justice is essentially a matter of fairness and is relevant to two main situations in social life (p.158). The first is thedistribution of benefits or burdens among individuals who are classed in certain ways. Thesecond is compensation, in which some injury done by one person to another is redressed.Justice in its primary signification relates to situations of distribution and compensation, and it
involves a constant and a variable component. The constant feature is the maxim ‘Treat likecases alike, and different cases differently’ (the ‘like cases maxim’, as I shall call it). But, as
Hart rightly points out, in the absence of some criterion for determining what shall count as
the relevant point of likeness or unlikeness, this maxim will remain ‘an empty formula’
(p.159). What is the relevant criterion of resemblance will often be controversial, implicatingthe deeper moral outlooks of the disputants, and will vary from case to case, dependingamong other things on the nature of the benefit or burden in question or the relations in whichindividuals stand. For example, in the distribution of health care, the relevant criterion of distribution might be need, whereas in the distribution of tertiary education, it might be somecombination of individual merit and social utility.