When talking about justice, we mean more than its day-today administration involving offi cials, institutions, and those most affected. We also refer to an ideal: a set of basic values which guide living together and infuse the distribution of rights and duties, options and obligations, freedoms and restrictions. Losing this reference point means the administration of justice will suffer too, by having lost its sense of direction. With thirty years' experience in the Italian judiciary and dozens of infl uential judicial inquiries to his name Gherardo Colombo refl ects on the culture of justice and the profound meaning of rules. Without respecting rules, we cannot live in society.