Scales in one hand, an upright sword in the other, facing you directly. This Justice is not blindfolded — the point is that she sees everything and weighs it anyway.
This card usually marks the accounts coming due. What you have been doing arrives as outcome, and it does not soften either direction. It shows up often around genuinely procedural things too: contracts, disputes, settlements, reviews.
The fairness here is not kindness. Scales do not make allowances and a sword is for cutting. If you are weighing whether to extend someone an exception, this card leans toward following the rule — because one exception becomes the rule.
Reversed, the scales are tilted. One side keeps absorbing the loss, or something went wrong and nobody has picked it up, or you are applying a standard to others that you quietly exempt yourself from. That last one is the most common. Hold your own conduct to the measure you use on other people and it usually comes up short. When this card is reversed, look there first.
Plenty of people read Justice as 'I am right, so I win'. But the card does not take sides. It says what you did comes back, which can land in your favour or against you. Whether it is welcome depends entirely on what you have been doing until now. The scales do not tip toward what you would prefer.
With the Tower, the reckoning does not arrive quietly. With Temperance it settles gradually instead. Justice takes its direction from you and its magnitude from the card beside it.