Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

@article{199790,
        author = {Parth Ajit Kadam and Dr. Rajesh Singh},
        title = {Justice, Dharma and Law: A Comparative Study of the Western and Indian Legal Traditions},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {11},
        pages = {14899-14904},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=199790},
        abstract = {The concept of Justice is one of the most fundamental and enduring concerns of the legal philosophy, and yet, its content and relationship to positive law has been understood very differently across jurisdictions. This article undertakes a systematic comparative analysis of justice in Western Legal Thought as well as in Indian Legal Thought, with attention also given to the concept of Dharma as the normative foundation of the Indian Legal Tradition. With the help of doctrinal and philosophical research, this study traces the evolution of justice in Western Legal Thought from ancient Greek Philosophy which is Plato’s functional justice, Aristotle’s distribution and corrective justice, through Roman Jurisprudence, the natural law tradition of Thomas Aquinas, the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau, then the Legal Positivism of Bentham, Austin and Hart and the contemporary Liberal Theory of Dworkin and Rawls. It then also examines the Indian concept of Dharma as the cosmic and moral order, the Dharma shastra literature, Kautilya’s Artha shastra and the post-colonial constitutional synthesis effected by Dr. B.R.Ambedkar. This study finds significant convergences between the two traditions, particularly in the recognition of a higher normative standard transcending the positive law and the value placed on procedural fairness and significant divergences in their treatment of individualism versus relational obligation, universalism versus pluralism and the separability of law from morality. This article finally concludes that a productive dialogue between these traditions offers rich normative resources for contemporary jurisprudence, particularly in the Indian constitutional context, where the inherited Dharmic tradition and the liberal constitutional framework remain in creative and ongoing tensions.},
        keywords = {Comparative Jurisprudence, Constitutional Morality, Dharma, Indian Legal Thought, Justice, Legal Tradition, Legal Positivism, Natural Law, Western Legal Thought.},
        month = {April},
        }