This paper tries to show that the idea of a right of the criminal to being punished, which founds and legitimizes Hegel's retributive conception of justice in his Philosophy of Right, is closely linked in fact with the way he used to think about the tragic in his early writings. Moreover, in the light of Schelling's reading of the tragic conflict aroused by the affirmation of freedom, in the Letters on Criticism and Dogmatism, it will be possible to investigate what this substantial background, thus interfering with law, concretely means for the question of Justice.