Fairness vs Justice

How often do you hear people say things like, "... but that's not fair..."?

People often appeal to some sort of sense of fairness; in many cases I think that this is good and appropriate, but sometimes it clearly is not.

Sometimes people also appeal to fairness as if it's some sort of Christian/theological virtue. But when you actually think about it, I don't think there's much of a case to be made for fairness if you look in the scriptures.

The reason why this comes to mind for me is that I recently ran across this quote in an article written by N. T. Wright:

"Justice never means 'treating everybody the same way' [ie. fairness], but 'treating people appropriately', which involves making distinctions between different people and situations." (This was written in the context of the homosexual debate within the Anglican Church; if you care you can read the whole article here).

A quick search found that, in the entire Bible (ESV), only Dt. 25:15 used the word "fair" (there were other usages of "fair", like "fair weather" but that's not what we're talking about), and 2 usages of "fairness" in 2 Cor. 8:13-14.

Compare these 3 usages of fair/fairness to 139 hits for "justice"! (There were 212 hits for "just" but I was to lazy to sift through alternate usages of that word... ie. "these things happened JUST as the LORD said", etc...).

What do you think:

Is God fair?

Is God just?

How are these two concepts similar/dissimilar?

What do you think of Wright's definition of justice?

What might be some the results, theologically speaking, of saying that God is fair vs saying that God is just?