Justice is often treated as a problem of design – to be solved by writing better laws, improving court procedures, or fine-tuning economic rules. Insights from complexity science, computer science, and jurisprudence challenge that view, suggesting that what we call “just” or “unjust” often emerges from the dynamic interactions of many smaller parts: from institutional feedback loops to the structure of social networks that shape opportunity.
I begin by framing justice as an emergent property of complex adaptive systems, illustrating this with three brief cases: (1) how local citation practices can cascade into power-law patterns of legal precedent; (2) how predictive-policing models trained on historical arrest data can amplify enforcement patterns into self-reinforcing cycles of surveillance and arrest; and (3) how automated public-benefits eligibility systems can, through rigid coding rules, cascade small errors into large-scale denials of aid.
In the second half, I turn to a more unsettling idea: what if the very question “What is justice?” is observer-dependent – its answer shaped by the lens through which we measure it? Legal philosophers have long debated law’s “open texture,” yet complexity science suggests a deeper complementarity: justice assessed for economic efficiency, procedural fairness, or network equity can yield contradictory but equally valid outcomes, much as a quantum particle shows different properties depending on how it is measured.
This reframing invites us to see justice not as a static goal to engineer, but as a living, adaptive process – sometimes multistable, even shapeshifting under observation. Complex Justice! asks whether interdisciplinary science can help us identify the leverage points and feedbacks that make some just orders stable, others fragile, and still others persistently contested. In the end, the question is not how to perfect the law’s rules, but how to steer the restless dynamics of human institutions toward futures that are fairer, more resilient, and still unfolding.
This event is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant #81366, as part of a three year research program at SFI on Emergent Engineering