Genealogy of the Concept of Justice in Constitutionalist Discourse: From the Demand for the Establishment of the House of Justice to Criminal Policy

Pakniyat, Mostafa

doi:10.22034/jrpl.2026.735850

Genealogy of the Concept of Justice in Constitutionalist Discourse: From the Demand for the Establishment of the House of Justice to Criminal Policy

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Mostafa Pakniyat

Assistant Professor,Department of Law, Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran,

10.22034/jrpl.2026.735850

Abstract

In the discourse of the Constitutional Revolution, justice emerged not merely as a moral virtue, but as the foundation of Iran’s new legal and political order. The concept of the House of Justice (Edalatkhaneh), which first took shape in popular slogans and in the thought of clerics and modernist intellectuals, marked the beginning of a transformation in the understanding of justice. This transformation moved from a moral and religious demand for justice toward its legal and structural conception. The House of Justice was not a clearly defined preexisting legal concept; rather, it functioned as a floating signifier and a field of discursive contestation that enabled the coalition of heterogeneous social forces while simultaneously concealing the radical nature of the revolution. Accordingly, the model of the House of Justice evolved through different stages, each displaying distinct sub-models ranging from reform of the judicial system to a structure resembling a representative assembly. In this way, justice became an instrument for limiting absolute power and safeguarding the public rights of citizens, and within this intellectual framework, the first steps toward the emergence of a modern Iranian criminal policy were also taken.
The principal aim of this study is to trace the evolution of this key concept from the initial demand for the establishment of the House of Justice—as a discursive construct for constraining despotic power and enforcing religious law—to the rise of the modern concept of criminal policy as a mechanism for the management of crime and punishment. This policy sought not merely to punish offenders, but also to restrain the punitive power of the state and guarantee individual freedoms. From this perspective, it may be argued that the criminal policy of the Constitutional era rested upon three pillars: legality in place of sovereign will, separation of institutions of justice from political power, and justice as the criterion of penal legitimacy. Indeed, in Constitutional thought, justice created a bridge between public law and criminal law in Iran—a bridge whose reconsideration may inspire the rethinking of contemporary Iranian criminal policy.

Keywords

House of Justice

Constitutional Movement

Rule of Law

Criminal Policy

Discourse of Justice