Inside Look at the Law : In ‘Justice,’ playwright Terry Curtis Fox explores the struggles of a Chicago lawyer and his peers, who may cut corners but try to do the right thing.

Referring to Terry Curtis Fox’s play “Justice,” director Bill Van Daalen says, “One of the characters refers to the lawyers in the play as being a bunch of shyster lawyers, and that sort of resonates right now. It’s very much on people’s minds about whether the legal system’s breaking down.”

“Justice,” opening tonight on American Renegade Theatre’s Stage 2, was first produced in 1979 at New York’s Playwrights Horizon, directed by another playwright, Thomas Babe. Van Daalen is right. Sixteen years hasn’t changed things much.

Fox, who co-authored the HBO film “Perfect Witness,” and “Final Fling” for CBS, is also known as a writer and producer for episodic TV, including “Hill Street Blues” and “Sweet Justice.”

As a playwright, Fox is best known for his first play in 1976, “Cops,” about a couple of rough Chicago street cops involved in a shootout in an all-night diner.

“Justice,” Fox says, is sort of a companion piece to “Cops.” It’s definitely not a sequel, but when there’s a police departmental hearing concerning the shootout, these are the lawyers the cops go to.

But the case is only mentioned as a throwaway. “Justice” is a personal play about a Chicago lawyer whose life is falling apart.

“The action is emotional,” Fox says. “These lawyers are the legal version of the street cops. They’re not at all slick guys. They come from deep working-class neighborhoods. They cut a lot of corners, and they’re looking for schemes. But they’re not cheats. They’re just really unsophisticated. They’re probably the first people in their families to go to college, much less law school.”

The seed for “Justice” came from an overheard conversation on 44th Street in New York, about prenuptial agreements. It was as much a chance encounter as the genesis of Fox’s “Cops.”

At the time, he was a theater critic for the Chicago Reader. Stuart Gordon, who ran Chicago’s Organic Theatre, confronted him with, “Either put up or shut up. I need a play about cops.”

Fox smiles contentedly as he says, “Stuart saved me from a life of criticism. It was wonderful.”

A couple of years later, the overheard conversation about prenuptial agreements became the first conversation in “Justice,” transmogrified to concern prepaid divorce agreements.

Fox, who says he is both the son and husband of lawyers, added that at about the time he was writing “Justice,” his wife was deciding whether to go to law school.

He says: “She worked for, shall we say, people who were not dissimilar to the lawyers in this play. They were so different from the television projection of lawyers, the sort of sophisticated lawyers I knew in New York, or the people I knew who were going to law school.”

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Van Daalen thinks there may be some irony in the title.

“Justice,” he says, “is something that’s not pure, and it’s not God-given. It’s something that has to be determined by all of us, and these lawyers do the best they can in trying to figure out what it is. It’s nice to know how professional responsibility and ethics are taught in the colleges, but it doesn’t really apply to the everyday world.”

Fox, who agrees with his lawyer-wife’s assessment that he writes about people who move into moral jeopardy because of their work, leans forward to emphasize the point.

“Justice,” he says, “isn’t how things work in the real world. Integrity is an odd word there. A lot of what lawyers do is game playing. A lot of what these guys do is game playing. They enjoy what they do and they’re good at it. If these guys weren’t lawyers, they’d probably be on the factory floor. They’re cynical, deep Chicago boys. They do the best they can. They’re smart with their clients, and they’re not so smart with each other.”

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Justice.”

Location: American Renegade Theatre, Stage 2, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Ends July 2.

Price: $12.

Call: (213) 936-1594.