Symbolic Construction of Judicial Justice: Between Cognition and Norm

Under the value orientation of harmony and stability, in order to avoid the tearing of society caused by judicial decision-making, pragmatism judicial philosophy emphasizes that “the greatest justice is to eliminate social contradictions”. This kind of illusion of justice based on interest identification is doomed to form a short-term consensus between the cognitive expectations of stakeholders, and can’t provide institutional tension. Under the pattern of “individualization of ultimate value”, it is even possible to form a dilemma of institutional identity of beneficiaries who “take up the bowl to eat meat and put down chopsticks to curse”. From the perspective of stabilizing social expectations, the most commendable feature of “Ma Xiwu trial mode” lies in its spontaneous construction of a “mechanism that places the third party in the position of expected guarantor”. In this way, the expectation of the behavior conforming to the standard and the expectation of this expectation come not only from the stakeholders present, but also from the third party with “sense of substitution” and the social expectation behind it. Thus, compared with the limited consensus that can be reached in practice, the expectation with stability can be established. Thanks to the institutionalization of the third party’s expectation, we will not question the assumption of institutional justice under normal conditions.