by Randy E. Barnett | an
excerpt from... Chapter Nine The second kind of gap between interest and the liberal conception of justice and the rule of law arises when some persons subjectively desire to use resources that lie within other persons' rightful domains. To the extent that people faced with such a conflict choose to satisfy their preferences, they exceed their rightful jurisdiction and cross the boundaries defined by justice. When someone else's domain is invaded, a taking of the sort described in Chapter 8 occurs and the ability of justice to solve the first-order problem of knowledge and the problems of partiality and incentives is seriously compromised. In the absence of a willingness to adhere to the requirements of justice and the rule of law, some way must be found to secure compliance with its dictates lest justice and the rule of law cease to perform their crucial social functions. Accordingly, we may call this dimension of the problem of interst the compliance problem. It can be summarized as follows:
There
are then two distinguishable aspects of the compliance problem. The first
is compliance with justice, a problem that potentially applies to any
person and which I shall consider in this chapter. Second it the special
problem of obtaining compliance with the rule of law, a problem that applies
only to those persons charged with administering justice, and to which
I shall return in Chapter 13.
 
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