Justice incidental to the law...

[RadioRaheem84]

J. Edgar Hoover once said that justice is incidental to law and order. Am I missing something? Did he mean that justice was not that important to him as it was to preserve the social order, is this what he is saying? What is the meaning behind it?

Also any other quotes from other people like him that reveal their true colors?

[Fionnagáin]

He's admitting, as far as I can tell, that the function of the bourgeois state is to reproduce capitalist social relations (which he would probably call "social order", or simply "society"), rather than to achieve any sort of individual or social justice. He appears to suggest that "justice" is not irrelevant to this formulation, and perhaps even that such a thing really exists, but that whether or not it is satisfied is a matter of convenience, of whether it contributes to the reproduction of capitalist social relations for the state to act justly (or, more realistically, to be perceived to be acting justly by whatever group or groups), rather than an end in itself.

It's a fairly typical conservative notion of state, which stresses tradition and the consent of the governed, as opposed to a liberal notion of state which stresses the "social contract". For the liberal, the legitimacy of the state consists in, at the very minimum, treating the signatories of the social contract, i.e. the citizenry in a fair and even manner, while for conservatives, the legitimacy for the state is simply a practical question of it being perceived as legitimate, and must dispense or give the appearance of dispensing justice only insofar as is necessary to achieve that perception.