JULIUS JAY JR B. DASKEO

SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE PRESENT CONTEXT

            A.  SOCIAL JUSTICE AS AN EXPANDING CONCEPT

Justice Jose P. Laurel’s social justice formulation is an obiter dictum but it serves as a judicial parameter in the resolution of legal disputes. Metaphorically, the formulation is a social coming of age for the Philippine jurisprudence. In the language of Justice Laurel:

Social justice is neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism, nor anarchy, but the humanization of laws and the equalization of social and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and objectively secular conception may at least be approximated. Social justice means the promotion of the welfare of all the people, the adoption by the Government of measures calculated to insure economic stability of all the component elements of society, through the maintenance of a proper economic and social equilibrium in the interrelations of the members of the community, constitutionally, through the adoption of measures legally justifiable, or extra-constitutionally, through the exercise of powers underlying the existence of all governments on the time-honored principle of salus populi est suprema lex.

            The above-quoted definition speaks of the welfare of the people and the economic stability of all members of society as goals of social justice. Also, it proposes the means on how these goals may be attained: through the use of constitutional and extra-constitutional powers of the State.

Through times, however, the concept of social justice has expanded to cover economic, social and cultural rights. Some thinkers even claimed that social justice is achieved upon the realization of the fundamental social and economic rights. They equate social justice with the progressive realization of social and economic rights.