Enhancing Practical Wisdom as an Antidote to Flawed Law: Individual Phronesis within Judicial Practice

This article argues that the best remedy for the structural flaws of law (its unavoidable generality and its vulnerability to manipulation) is judicial practical wisdom (phronesis), understood both as an individual virtue and as an institutional quality. To illustrate this idea, the article refers to Lon L. Fuller’s “grudge informer” thought experiment and to Poland’s post-1989 lustration process, where conflicts between the letter and the spirit of the law revealed the danger of arbitrariness. The discussion then introduces virtue jurisprudence and reconstructs the ideal of phronesis as the quality judges need to deliver substantively just decisions. This ideal involves reflexivity and self-awareness, moral perception