Within the discourse of the Constitutional Revolution, “justice” emerged not merely as a moral virtue, but as the foundational pillar of Iran’s nascent legal and political order. The conceptualization of the House of Justice (Edalatkhaneh) which originated in popular slogans and the collective thought of clerics and modernist intellectuals marked a pivotal transformation: a shift from justice as an abstract moral or religious aspiration toward a structural and legal imperative. The House of Justice did not represent a settled legal institution; rather, it functioned as a “floating signifier” and a site of discursive contestation. This ambiguity enabled the formation of a coalition among heterogeneous social forces while simultaneously obscuring the radical implications of the revolution. Consequently, the model evolved through distinct stages, manifesting sub-models that ranged from a reformed judiciary to a nascent representative assembly.
In this context, justice became a critical instrument for restraining absolute power and safeguarding public rights; within this intellectual framework, the foundations for a modern Iranian criminal policy were established. This study traces the evolution of this concept from the initial demand for the House of Justiceconceived as a discursive construct to constrain despotic power and enforce the rule of lawto the emergence of a modern criminal policy focused on the systematic management of crime and punishment. This emerging policy sought not only to regulate the conduct of offenders but also to curb the arbitrary punitive power of the state and guarantee individual liberties. It is argued that the criminal policy of the Constitutional era rested upon three pillars: the principle of legality replacing the sovereign’s absolute will, the separation of judicial institutions from political power, and the recognition of justice as the sole criterion for penal legitimacy. Ultimately, in Constitutional thought, justice served as a bridge between public law and criminal law a synthesis that offers valuable insights for the critical reconsideration of contemporary Iranian criminal policy.