what is justice for you essay

Essays About Justice: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Discover our guide with examples of essays about justice and prompts for your essay writing and discuss vital matters relating to a person’s or nation’s welfare. 

Justice, in general, refers to the notion that individuals get what they deserve. It includes fundamental moral values ​​in law and politics and is considered an act of fairness, equality, and honesty. Four types of justice deal with how victims can solicit a verdict. They are procedural, distributive, retributive, and restorative. There are many pieces with justice as the subject. It’s because justice is a broad subject encompassing many human values.

5 Essay Examples

1. juvenile justice system of usa essay by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. wrongful convictions in criminal justice system by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. racial profiling within the criminal justice system by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. criminal justice: the ban-the-box law by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. the special needs of the criminal justice on mental illness cases by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is justice, 2. is justice only for the rich and powerful, 3. the importance of justice, 4. the justice system in mainstream media, 5. justice: then vs. now, 6. justice system around the world, 7. obstructions to justice.

“No doubt, familiarity about the nature of juvenile crimes and how juvenile justice structures function across the world will offer an insight to policy makers, social scientists and for gullible citizens. Thus, a comparative analysis will throw light on how well or how poorly one nation is exercising relative to other nations.”

The essay delves into the justice system process for teenagers who are 18 years and below who commit wrongful acts. Most teenagers involved in juvenile crimes do not have a strong foundation or parental support. The author also talks about the treatments, boot camps, and retreat houses available for teenagers serving in juvenile prisons.

The ever-increasing number of juvenile crimes in the world reflects the mismanagement and lack of juvenile courts, sentencing programs, rehabilitation, and age-appropriate treatment. The writer believes that if mistrials remain in the juvenile system, the problem will continue. They suggest that the government must initiate more system reforms and provide juvenile offenders with proper ethical education.

“The justice system is composed of various legal groups and actors, making a miscarriage possible at any stage of the legal process, or at the hands of any legal actor. Eyewitness error, police misconduct, or falsification of evidence are examples of factors that may lead to a wrongful conviction.”

In this essay, the author uses various citations that show the justice system’s flaws in the process and criteria of its rulings. It further discusses the different instances of unfair judgments and mentions that at least 1% of all convicts serving prison time were wrongfully accused. 

The writer believes that changing the way of addressing different cases and ensuring that all legal professionals do their assigned duties will result in fair justice. You might also be interested in these essays about choice .

“Here in the 21st century, we don’t exactly have ‘Black Codes’ we have what is known as Racial Profiling. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defines racial profiling as ‘the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race ethnicity, religion or national origin.’”

This essay investigates the involvement of race in the criminal justice system, whether they are victims or perpetrators. The author claims that some law enforcement officers mistreat and misjudge people because of their race and presents various cases as evidence of these discriminatory actions. One example is the case of an unarmed black teenager, Jordan Edwards , who was shot because former officer Roy Oliver thought his partner was in danger.

Unfortunately, law enforcement officials use their power and position in society to deny any act of racial profiling, rendering the said law useless. The author declares that while their paper may not prove racial bias in the criminal justice system, they can prove that a person’s color plays a role and can cause harm.

“I think the Ban-the-Box law is the best way of creating employment opportunities for ex-convicts without discrimination. Criminal offenses vary in the degree of the crime, making it unfair to treat all ex-convicts the same. Moreover, some felons learn from their mistakes during detention and parole, creating a better and law-abiding citizen with the ability to work faithfully.”

The essay explains how ex-convicts or current convicts are consistently discriminated against. This discrimination affects their lives even after serving their sentence, especially in their rights to vote and work. 

Regarding job hunting, the author believes the Ban-the-Box law will effectively create more employment opportunities. The law allows employers to see an ex-convict’s skills rather than just their record.  The essay concludes with a reminder that everyone is entitled to a civil right to vote, while private enterprises are free to run background checks. 

“Case management focuses on incorporating key elements that focus on improving the wellbeing of individuals that are being assessed. Mental illness within the criminal justice system is treated as a sensitive issue that requires urgent intervention in order to ensure that an inmate is able to recover.”

This essay pries into one of the most delicate areas of ruling in the justice system, which is leading mentally ill convicts. Offenders who were deemed mentally ill should be able to receive particular treatments for their health while serving time. 

The author mentions that every country must be able to provide mental health services for the inmates to prevent conflicts inside the prison. In conclusion, they suggest that reviewing and prioritizing policies related to mental illness is the best solution to the issue.

Are you interested in writing about mental illnesses? Check out our guide on how to write essays about depression.

7 Prompts for Essays About Justice

Justice is a vast subject, and its literal meaning is the quality of being just. This process often occurs when someone who has broken the law gets what they should, whether freedom or punishment. Research and discuss everything there is to know about justice so your readers can fully understand it. Include a brief history of its origins, types, and uses.

Several situations prove that justice is only for the rich. One of the main reasons is the expensive court fees. Research why victims settle outside the court or just let their abusers get away with crimes.

Include data that proves justice is a luxury where the only ones who can ask for equal treatment are those with resources—present situations or well-known cases to support your statements. On the other hand, you can also provide counter-arguments such as government programs that help financially-challenged individuals.

Every citizen has the right to be protected and treated fairly in court. Explain the importance of justice to a person, society, and government. Then, add actual cases of how justice is applied to encourage reform or chaos. Include relevant cases that demonstrate how justice impacts lives and legal changes, such as the case of Emmett Till .

Talk about how justice is usually depicted on screen and how it affects people’s expectations of how the justice system works. Popular television shows such as Suits and Law and Order are examples of the justice system being portrayed in the media. Research these examples and share your opinion on whether movies or television portray the justice system accurately or not.

In this essay, research how justice worldwide has changed. This can include looking at legal systems, human rights, and humanity’s ever-changing opinions. For instance, child labor was considered normal before but is viewed as an injustice today. List significant changes in justice and briefly explain why they have changed over time. You might also be interested in these essays about violence .

Countries have different ways of instilling justice within their societies. For this prompt, research and discuss the countries you think have the best and worst legal systems. Then, point out how these differences affect the country’s crime rates and quality of life for its citizens.

Examine why people tend to take justice into their hands, disobey legal rules, or give up altogether. It can be because seeking justice is an arduous process resulting in emotional and financial burdens. Often, this occurs when a person feels their government is not providing the support they need. Take a look at this social issue, and discuss it in your essay for a strong argumentative. 

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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The idea of justice occupies centre stage both in ethics, and in legal and political philosophy. We apply it to individual actions, to laws, and to public policies, and we think in each case that if they are unjust this is a strong, maybe even conclusive, reason to reject them. Classically, justice was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues (and sometimes as the most important of the four); in modern times John Rawls famously described it as ‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (Rawls 1971, p.3; Rawls, 1999, p.3). We might debate which of these realms of practical philosophy has first claim on justice: is it first and foremost a property of the law, for example, and only derivatively a property of individuals and other institutions? But it is probably more enlightening to accept that the idea has over time sunk deep roots in each of these domains, and to try to make sense of such a wide-ranging concept by identifying elements that are present whenever justice is invoked, but also examining the different forms it takes in various practical contexts. This article aims to provide a general map of the ways in which justice has been understood by philosophers, past and present.

We begin by identifying four core features that distinguish justice from other moral and political ideas. We then examine some major conceptual contrasts: between conservative and ideal justice, between corrective and distributive justice, between procedural and substantive justice, and between comparative and non-comparative justice. Next we turn to questions of scope: to who or what do principles of justice apply? We ask whether non-human animals can be subjects of justice, whether justice applies only between people who already stand in a particular kind of relationship to one another, and whether individual people continue to have duties of justice once justice-based institutions have been created. We then examine three overarching theories that might serve to unify the different forms of justice: utilitarianism, contractarianism, and egalitarianism. But it seems, in conclusion, that no such theory is likely be successful.

More detailed discussions of particular forms of justice can be found in other entries: see especially distributive justice , global justice , intergenerational justice , international distributive justice , justice and bad luck , justice as a virtue , and retributive justice .

1.1 Justice and Individual Claims

1.2 justice, charity and enforceable obligation, 1.3 justice and impartiality, 1.4 justice and agency, 2.1 conservative versus ideal justice, 2.2 corrective versus distributive justice, 2.3 procedural versus substantive justice, 2.4 comparative versus non-comparative justice, 3.1 human vs non-human animals, 3.2 relational vs non-relational justice, 3.3 individuals vs institutions, 3.4 recognition vs. redistribution, 4.1 accommodating intuitions about justice, 4.2 utilitarian theories of justice: three problems, 5.1 gauthier, 5.3 scanlon, 6.1 justice as equality, 6.2 responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism, 6.3 relational egalitarianism, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. justice: mapping the concept.

‘Justice’ has sometimes been used in a way that makes it virtually indistinguishable from rightness in general. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between ‘universal’ justice that corresponded to ‘virtue as a whole’ and ‘particular’ justice which had a narrower scope (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, chs. 1–2). The wide sense may have been more evident in classical Greek than in modern English. But Aristotle also noted that when justice was identified with ‘complete virtue’, this was always ‘in relation to another person’. In other words, if justice is to be identified with morality as such, it must be morality in the sense of ‘what we owe to each other’ (see Scanlon 1998). But it is anyway questionable whether justice should be understood so widely. At the level of individual ethics, justice is often contrasted with charity on the one hand, and mercy on the other, and these too are other-regarding virtues. At the level of public policy, reasons of justice are distinct from, and often compete with, reasons of other kinds, for example economic efficiency or environmental value.

As this article will endeavour to show, justice takes on different meanings in different practical contexts, and to understand it fully we have to grapple with this diversity. But it is nevertheless worth asking whether we find a core concept that runs through all these various uses, or whether it is better regarded as a family resemblance idea according to which different combinations of features are expected to appear on each occasion of use. The most plausible candidate for a core definition comes from the Institutes of Justinian , a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as ‘the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due’. This is of course quite abstract until further specified, but it does throw light upon four important aspects of justice.

First, it shows that justice has to do with how individual people are treated (‘to each his due’). Issues of justice arise in circumstances in which people can advance claims – to freedom, opportunities, resources, and so forth – that are potentially conflicting, and we appeal to justice to resolve such conflicts by determining what each person is properly entitled to have. In contrast, where people’s interests converge, and the decision to be taken is about the best way to pursue some common purpose – think of a government official having to decide how much food to stockpile as insurance against some future emergency – justice gives way to other values. In other cases, there may be no reason to appeal to justice because resources are so plentiful that we do not need to worry about allotting shares to individuals. Hume pointed out that in a hypothetical state of abundance where ‘every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetites can want’, ‘the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of’ (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , pp. 183–4). Hume also believed – and philosophical controversy on this point persists until today – that justice has no place in close personal relationships, such as the family, where (it is alleged) each identifies with the others’ interests so strongly that there is no need and no reason for anyone to make claims of personal entitlement. (See Sandel 1982 for a defence of this view; for a critique, see Okin 1989. See also the entry on feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family) .

That justice is a matter of how each separate person is treated appears to create problems for theories such as utilitarianism that judge actions and policies on the basis of their overall consequences aggregated across people – assuming that these theories wish to incorporate rather than discard the idea of justice. In Section 4 below we examine how utilitarians have attempted to respond to this challenge.

Although justice is centrally a matter of how individuals are treated, it is also possible to speak of justice for groups – for example when the state is allocating resources between different categories of citizens. Here each group is being treated as though it were a separate individual for purposes of the allocation.

Second, Justinian’s definition underlines that just treatment is something due to each person, in other words that justice is a matter of claims that can be rightfully made against the agent dispensing justice, whether a person or an institution. Here there is a contrast with other virtues: we demand justice, but we beg for charity or forgiveness. This also means that justice is a matter of obligation for the agent dispensing it, and that the agent wrongs the recipient if the latter is denied what is due to her. It is a characteristic mark of justice that the obligations it creates should be enforceable: we can be made to deliver what is due to others as a matter of justice, either by the recipients themselves or by third parties. However it overstates the position to make the enforceability of its requirements a defining feature of justice (see Buchanan 1987). On the one hand, there are some claims of justice that seem not to be enforceable (by anyone). When we dispense gifts to our children or our friends, we ought to treat each recipient fairly, but neither the beneficiaries themselves nor anyone else can rightfully force the giver to do so. On the other hand, in cases of extreme emergency, it may sometimes be justifiable to force people to do more than justice requires them to do – there may exist enforceable duties of humanity. But these are rare exceptions. The obligatory nature of justice generally goes hand-in-hand with enforceability.

The third aspect of justice to which Justinian’s definition draws our attention is the connection between justice and the impartial and consistent application of rules – that is what the ‘constant and perpetual will’ part of the definition conveys. Justice is the opposite of arbitrariness. It requires that where two cases are relevantly alike, they should be treated in the same way (We discuss below the special case of justice and lotteries). Following a rule that specifies what is due to a person who has features X , Y , Z whenever such a person is encountered ensures this. And although the rule need not be unchangeable – perpetual in the literal sense – it must be relatively stable. This explains why justice is exemplified in the rule of law, where laws are understood as general rules impartially applied over time. Outside of the law itself, individuals and institutions that want to behave justly must mimic the law in certain ways (for instance, gathering reliable information about individual claimants, allowing for appeals against decisions).

Finally, the definition reminds us that justice requires an agent whose will alters the circumstances of its objects. The agent might be an individual person, or it might be a group of people, or an institution such as the state. So we cannot, except metaphorically, describe as unjust states of affairs that no agent has contributed to bringing about – unless we think that there is a Divine Being who has ordered the universe in such a way that every outcome is a manifestation of His will. Admittedly we are tempted to make judgements of what is sometimes called ‘cosmic injustice’ – say when a talented person’s life is cut cruelly short by cancer, or our favourite football team is eliminated from the competition by a freak goal – but this is a temptation we should resist.

This agency condition, however, is less restrictive than it might at first appear. It by no means excludes the possibility that agents can create injustice by omission – for example by failing to create the institutions or to enact the policies that would deliver vital resources to those who need them. Thus it is now common to speak of ‘systemic injustice’ in the case of bad outcomes that no-one intends to occur but that could be prevented by a shift in social norms or institutional practices. The agents in these cases are all those who by acting together to change these things could invert the injustice, but have so far failed to do so.

2. Justice: Four Distinctions

We have so far looked at four elements that are present in every use of the concept of justice. Now it is time to consider some equally important contrasts.

Philosophers writing on justice have observed that it has two different faces, one conservative of existing norms and practices, the other demanding reform of these norms and practices (see Sidgwick 1874/1907, Raphael 2001). Thus on the one hand it is a matter of justice to respect people’s rights under existing law or moral rules, or more generally to fulfil the legitimate expectations they have acquired as a result of past practice, social conventions, and so forth; on the other hand, justice often gives us reason to change laws, practices and conventions quite radically, thereby creating new entitlements and expectations. This exposes an ambiguity in what it means to ‘render each his due’. What is ‘due’ might be what a person can reasonably expect to have given existing law, policy, or social practice, or it might be what the person should get under a regime of ideal justice: this could mean what the person deserves, or needs, or is entitled to on grounds of equality, depending on which ideal principle is being invoked.

Conceptions of justice vary according to the weight they attach to each of these faces. At one extreme, some conceptions interpret justice as wholly concerned with what individuals can claim under existing laws and social conventions: thus for Hume, justice was to be understood as adherence to a set of rules that assign physical objects to individuals (such as being the first possessor of such an object) (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , Book III, Part II). These rules can be explained by reference to the natural associations that form in people’s minds between persons and external objects, and although the system of justice as a whole can be shown to be socially useful, there are no relevant independent standards by which its principles can be assessed (Hume briskly dismissed equality and merit as principles for allocating property to persons). In similar vein, Hayek argued that justice was a property of individual behaviour, understood as compliance with the ‘rules of just conduct’ that had evolved to enable a market economy to function effectively. For Hayek, to speak of ‘social justice’ as an ideal standard of distribution was as meaningless as to speak of a ‘moral stone’ (Hayek 1976, p. 78)

At the other extreme stand conceptions of justice which posit some ideal principle of distribution such as equality, together with a ‘currency’ specifying the respect in which justice requires people to be made equally well off, and then refuse to acknowledge the justice of any claims that do not arise directly from the application of this principle. Thus claims deriving from existing law or practice are dismissed unless they happen to coincide with what the principle requires. More often, however, ideal justice is seen as proposing principles by which existing institutions and practices can be assessed, with a view to reforming them, or in the extreme case abolishing them entirely, while the claims that people already have under those practices are given some weight. Rawls, for example, whose two principles of justice count as ideal principles for this purpose, is at pains to stress that they are not intended to be applied in a way that disregards people’s existing legitimate expectations. About the ‘difference principle’, which requires social and economic inequalities to be regulated so that they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, he says:

It applies to the announced system of public law and statutes and not to particular transactions or distributions, nor to the decisions of individuals and associations, but rather to the institutional background against which these transactions and decisions take place. There are no unannounced and unpredictable interferences with citizens’ expectations and acquisitions. Entitlements are earned and honored as the public system of rules declares. (Rawls 1993, p. 283)

Here we see Rawls attempting to reconcile the demands of conservative and ideal justice. Yet he does not directly address the question of what should happen when changing circumstances mean that the difference principle requires new laws or policies to be enacted: do those whose prior entitlements or expectations are no longer met have a claim to be compensated for their loss? We could call this the question of transitional justice (though this phrase is often used now in a more specific sense to refer to the process of reconciliation that may occur following civil war or other armed conflicts: see the entry on transitional justice ).

A second important contrast, whose pedigree reaches back at least as far as Aristotle, is between justice as a principle for assigning distributable goods of various kinds to individual people, and justice as a remedial principle that applies when one person wrongly interferes with another’s legitimate holdings. Thus suppose Bill steals Alice’s computer, or sells Alice faulty goods which he claims to be in perfect order: then Alice suffers a loss, which justice demands that Bill should remedy by returning the computer or fulfilling his contract honestly. Corrective justice, then, essentially concerns a bilateral relationship between a wrongdoer and his victim, and demands that the fault be cancelled by restoring the victim to the position she would have been in had the wrongful behaviour not occurred; it may also require that the wrongdoer not benefit from his faulty behaviour. Distributive justice, on the other hand, is multilateral: it assumes a distributing agent, and a number of persons who have claims on what is being distributed. Justice here requires that the resources available to the distributor be shared according to some relevant criterion, such as equality, desert, or need. In Aristotle’s example, if there are fewer flutes available than people who want to play them, they should be given to the best performers (Aristotle, The Politics , p. 128). In modern debates, principles of distributive justice are applied to social institutions such as property and tax systems, which are understood as producing distributive outcomes across large societies, or even the world as a whole.

The conceptual distinction between distributive and corrective justice seems clear, but their normative relationship is more difficult to pin down (see Perry 2000, Ripstein 2004, Coleman 1992, chs. 16–17). Some have claimed that corrective justice is merely instrumental to distributive justice: its aim is to move from a situation of distributive injustice brought about by the faulty behaviour to one that is more nearly (if not perfectly) distributively just. But this view runs into a number of objections. One is that so long as Alice has a legitimate title to her computer, her claim of corrective justice against Bill does not depend on her having had, prior to the theft, the share of resources that distributive justice ideally demands. She might be richer than she deserves to be, yet corrective justice still require that the computer be returned to her. In other words, corrective justice may serve to promote conservative rather than ideal justice, to use the distinction introduced in 2.1. Another objection is that corrective justice requires the wrongdoer himself to restore or compensate the person he has wronged, even if the cause of distributive justice could be better served by transferring resources from a third party – giving Alice one of even-more-undeservedly-rich Charles’s computers, for example. This underlines the bilateral nature of corrective justice, and also the fact that it comes into play in response to faulty behaviour on someone’s part. Its primary demand is that people should not lose out because others have behaved wrongfully or carelessly, but it also encompasses the idea that ‘no man should profit by his own wrong’. If Alice loses her computer in a boating accident, she might, under an insurance scheme, have a claim of distributive justice to a new machine, but she has no claim of corrective justice.

If corrective justice cannot be subsumed normatively under distributive justice, we need to explain its value. What is achieved when we make Bill return the computer to Alice? Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. 4) suggested that corrective justice aims to restore the two parties to a position of equality; by returning the computer we cancel both Bill’s unjustified gain and Alice’s unjustified loss. But this assumes that the computer can be returned intact. Corrective justice requires that Alice be made no worse off than she was before the theft, even if that means Bill suffering an absolute loss (e.g. by paying for a new computer if he has damaged Alice’s). Aristotle himself recognized that the idea of evening out gain and loss made no literal sense in a case where one person assaults another and has to compensate him for his injury – there is no ‘gain’ to be redistributed. It seems, then, that the value of corrective justice must lie in the principle that each person must take responsibility for his own conduct, and if he fails to respect the legitimate interests of others by causing injury, he must make good the harm. In that way, each person can plan her life secure in the knowledge that she will be protected against certain kinds of external setbacks. Philosophers and lawyers writing on corrective justice disagree about what standard of responsibility should apply – for example whether compensation is required only when one person wilfully or negligently causes another to suffer loss, or whether it can also be demanded when the perpetrator displays no such fault but is nevertheless causally responsible for the injury.

A third distinction that must be drawn is between the justice of the procedures that might be used to determine how benefits and burdens of various kinds are allocated to people, and the justice of the final allocation itself. It might initially seem as though the justice of a procedure can be reduced to the justice of the results produced by applying it, but this is not so. For one thing, there are cases in which the idea of an independently just outcome makes no sense. A coin toss is a fair way of deciding who starts a game, but neither the Blues nor the Reds have a claim of justice to bat first or kick off. But even where a procedure has been shaped by a concern that it should produce substantively just outcomes, it may still have special properties that make it intrinsically just. In that case, using a different procedure to produce the same result might be objectionable. In an influential discussion, John Rawls contrasted perfect procedural justice , where a procedure is such that if it is followed a just outcome is guaranteed (requiring the person who cuts a cake to take the last slice himself is the illustration Rawls provides), imperfect procedural justice , where the procedure is such that following it is likely, but not certain, to produce the just result, and pure procedural justice , such as the coin-tossing example, where there is no independent way to assess the outcome – if we call it just, it is only on the grounds that it has come about by following the relevant procedure (Rawls 1971, 1999, § 14).

Theories of justice can then be distinguished according to the relative weight they attach to procedures and substantive outcomes. Some theories are purely procedural in form. Robert Nozick distinguished between historical theories of justice, end-state theories, and patterned theories in order to defend the first against the second and third (Nozick 1974). An end-state theory defines justice in terms of some overall property of a distribution (of resources, welfare, etc.) – for example whether it is egalitarian, or whether the lowest position in the distribution is as high as it can be, as Rawls’ difference principle requires. A patterned theory looks at whether what each receives as part of a distribution matches some individual feature such as their desert or their need. By contrast, an historical theory asks about the process by which the final outcome has arisen. In Nozick’s particular case, a distribution of resources is said to be just if everyone within its scope is entitled to what they now own, having acquired it by legitimate means – such as voluntary contract or gift – from someone who was also entitled to have it, leading back eventually to a just act of acquisition – such as labouring on a plot of land – that gave the first owner his valid title. The shape of the final distribution is irrelevant: according to Nozick, justice is entirely a matter of the sequence of prior events that created it (for critical assessments of Nozick’s position, see Paul 1982, Wolff 1991, Cohen 1995, chs. 1–2).

For most philosophers, however, the justice of a procedure is to a large extent a function of the justice of the outcomes that it tends to produce when applied. For instance, the procedures that together make up a fair trial are justified on the grounds that for the most part they produce outcomes in which the guilty are punished and the innocent are acquitted. Yet even in these cases, we should be wary of assuming that the procedure itself has no independent value. We can ask of a procedure whether it treats the people to whom it is applied justly, for example by giving them adequate opportunities to advance their claims, not requiring them to provide personal information that they find humiliating to reveal, and so forth. Studies by social psychologists have shown that in many cases people care more about being treated fairly by the institutions they have to deal with than about how they fare when the procedure’s final result is known (Lind and Tyler 1988).

Justice takes a comparative form when to determine what is due to one person we need to look at what others can also claim: to determine how large a slice of pie is rightfully John’s, we have to know how many others have a claim to the pie, and also what the principle for sharing it should be – equality, or something else. Justice takes a non-comparative form when we can determine what is due to a person merely by knowing relevant facts about that particular person: if John has already been promised the whole of the pie, then that is what he can rightfully claim for himself. Some theories of justice seem to imply that justice is always a comparative notion – for example when it is said that justice consists in the absence of arbitrary inequality – whereas others imply that it is always non-comparative. But conceptually, at least, both forms seem admissible; indeed we can find cases in which it appears we have to choose between doing justice comparatively and doing it non-comparatively (see Feinberg 1974; for a critical response, see Montague 1980). For example, we might have several candidates all of whom are roughly equally deserving of an academic honour, but the number of honours we are permitted to award is smaller than the number of candidates. If we honour some but not others, we perpetrate a comparative injustice, but if to avoid doing so we honour no-one at all, then each is treated less well than they deserve, and so unjustly from a non-comparative perspective.

Theories of justice can then be categorised according to whether they are comparative, non-comparative, or neither. Principles of equality – principles requiring the equal distribution of some kind of benefit – are plainly comparative in form, since what is due to each person is simply an equal share of the benefit in question rather than any fixed amount. In the case of principles of desert, the position is less straightforward. These principles take the form ‘ A deserves X by virtue of P ’, where X is a mode of treatment, and P is a personal characteristic possessed by A (Feinberg 1970). In the case of both X and P , we can ask whether they are to be identified comparatively or non-comparatively. Thus what A deserves might either be an entitlement, or an absolute amount of some benefit – ‘a living wage’, say – or it might be a share of some collective benefit, or a multiple or fraction of what others are receiving – ‘twice what B is getting’, say. Turning to P , or what is often called the desert basis, this may be a feature of A that we can identify without reference to anyone else, or it may be a comparative feature, such as being the best student in a graduating class. So desert-based claims of justice might take one of four different forms depending on whether the basis of desert and/or the deserved mode of treatment is comparative or non-comparative (see Olsaretti 2003 for essays that address this question; for a more advanced treatment, see Kagan 2012, Part III).

Among principles of justice that are straightforwardly non-comparative are ‘sufficiency’ principles which hold that what justice requires is that each person should have ‘enough’, on some dimension or other – for instance, have all of their needs fulfilled, or have a specified set of capabilities that they are able to exercise (for a general defence of sufficiency, though not one that links it specifically to justice, see Frankfurt 2015; for a critique, see Casal 2007). Such principles, however, need to be supplemented by other principles, not only to tell us what to do with the surplus (assuming there is one) once everyone has sufficient resources, but also to guide us in situations where there are too few resources to bring everyone up to the sufficiency threshold. Should we, for example, maximise the number of people who achieve sufficiency, or minimise the aggregate shortfall suffered by those in the relevant group? Unless we are prepared to say that these are not matters of justice, a theory of justice that contains only the sufficiency principle and nothing else looks incomplete.

Some theories of justice cannot readily be classified either as comparative or as non-comparative. Consider one part of Rawls’ theory of social justice, the difference principle, which as noted above requires that social and economic inequalities be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (Rawls 1971, 1999, §12–13). Under this principle, ideally just shares are calculated by determining what each person would receive under the set of social institutions whose economic effect is to raise the worst off person to the highest possible level. This is neither a fixed amount, nor one that depends in any direct sense on what other individuals are receiving, or should receive. Applying the difference principle does require making comparisons, but these are comparisons between the effects of different social institutions – say different tax laws, or different ways of defining property rights – not between individual people and the amounts of benefit they are receiving. We might call theories of this kind ‘holistic’ or ‘systemic’.

3. The Scope of Justice

When we raise questions about the scope of justice, we are asking about when principles of justice take effect and among whom . We have already, when discussing Hume, encountered the idea that there might be circumstances in which justice becomes irrelevant – circumstances in which resources are so abundant that it is pointless to allocate individual shares, or, as Hume also believed, in which resources are so scarce that everyone is permitted to grab what he can in the name of self-preservation. But even in circumstances that are less extreme than these, questions about scope arise. Who can make claims of justice, and who might have the corresponding obligation to meet them? Does this depend on the kind of thing that is being claimed? If comparative principles are being applied, who should be counted as part of the comparison group? Do some principles of justice have universal scope – they apply whenever agent A acts towards recipient B , regardless of the relationship between them – while others are contextual in character, applying only within social or political relationships of a certain kind? The present section examines some of these questions in greater detail.

What does a creature have to do, or be like, to be included within the scope of (at least some) principles of justice? Most past philosophers have assumed that the line should be drawn so as to exclude all non-human animals, but more recently some have been prepared to defend ‘justice for animals’ (Nussbaum 2006, ch. 6; Garner 2013). Against this, Rawls asserts that although we have ‘duties of compassion and humanity’ towards animals and should refrain from treating them cruelly, nonetheless they are ‘outside the scope of the theory of justice’ (Rawls 1971, p. 512; Rawls 1999, p. 448). How could this claim be justified?

We can focus our attention either on individual features that humans possess and animals lack, and that might be thought relevant to their inclusion within the scope of justice, or on asymmetries in the relationship between humans and other animals. To begin with the latter, Hume claimed that the domination humans exercised over animals – such that an animal could only possess something by virtue of our permission – meant that we were ‘bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them’ (Hume, Enquiry , p. 190). For Rawls and those influenced by him, principles of distributive justice apply among agents who are related to one another as participants in a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’, and this might seem to exclude animals from the scope of such principles. Critics of this view have pointed to cases of human-animal co-operation (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, Valentini 2014); however these arguments focus mainly or entirely on the special case of dogs , and it seems implausible to generalise from them in an attempt to show that human-animal relationships generally have a co-operative character.

But the claim that justice only applies to participants in co-operative practices is anyway vulnerable to the objection that it risks excluding seriously disabled people, people living in isolated communities, and future generations from the scope of justice, so it does not seem compelling as a claim about justice in general (see further below). Might there be other reasons why animals cannot make claims of justice on us? Another Rawls-inspired suggestion is that animals lack the necessary moral powers, in particular the capacity to act on principles of justice themselves. They cannot distinguish what is justly owed to them from what is not; and they cannot determine what they owe to others – whether to humans or to other non-human animals – as a matter of justice. This suggestion interprets justice as involving a kind of reciprocity: an agent to whom justice is due must also in principle be an agent who could dispense justice to others, by virtue of having the relevant capacity, even if for physical reasons – such as suffering from severe disability – they cannot do so in practice.

If this suggestion is rejected, and we allow that some animals, at least, should be included within the scope of justice, we can then ask about the form that justice should take in their cases. Using the distinction drawn in 2.4 above, it appears that justice for animals must be non-comparative. For example, we might attribute rights to the animals over whom we exercise power – rights against cruel treatment, and rights to food and shelter, for instance. This would involve using a sufficiency principle to determine what animals are owed as a matter of justice. It is much less plausible to think that comparative principles might apply, such that giving special treats to one cat but not another could count as an injustice.

The Rawlsian view introduced in the previous section, which holds that principles of social justice apply among people who are engaged together in a co-operative practice, is a leading example of a relational theory of justice. Other theories offer different accounts of the relevant justice-generating feature: for example, Nagel has argued that principles of distributive justice apply among people who by virtue of being citizens of the same state are required both to comply with, and accept responsibility for, the coercive laws that govern their lives (Nagel 2005). In both cases, the claim being made is that when people stand in a certain relationship to one another, they become subject to principles of justice whose scope is limited to those within the relationship. In particular, comparative principles apply within the relationship, but not beyond it. If A stands in a relationship (of the right kind) to B , then it becomes a matter of justice how A is treated relative to B , but it does not matter in the same way how A is treated relative to C who stands outside of the relationship. Justice may still require that C be given treatment of a certain kind, but that will be justice in its non-comparative guise.

Whether justice is relational in either of the ways that Rawls and Nagel suggest has large implications for its scope. In particular it bears on the question whether there is such a thing as global distributive justice, or, in contrast, whether distributive principles only apply to people who are related together as members of the same society or citizens of the same state. For example, might the global inequalities that exist between rich and poor in today’s world be unjust simply as inequalities, or are they unjust only insofar as they prevent poor people from living lives that we judge to be acceptable? (see entries on international distributive justice and global justice ) So much hangs on the question whether, and if so in virtue of what, distributive justice has a relational character. What reason can be given for thinking that it does?

Suppose we have two people A and B , of whom one is significantly better off than another – has greater opportunities or a higher income, say. Why should this be a concern of justice? It seems it will not be a concern unless it can be shown that the inequality between A and B can be attributed to the behaviour of some agent, individual or collective, whose actions or omissions have resulted in A being better off than B – in which case we can ask whether the inequality between them is justifiable, say on grounds of their respective deserts. This reiterates the claim in 1.4 above that without an agent to whom the outcome can be attributed there can only be justice or injustice in a metaphorical, ‘cosmic’, sense. Relational theorists claim that when people associate with one another in the relevant way, they become agents of justice. On a small scale they can organize informally to ensure that each receives what is due to him relative to the rest. On a larger scale, distributive justice requires the creation of legal and other institutions to achieve that outcome. Moreover failure to co-ordinate their actions in this way is likely to be a source of injustice by omission.

Debates about the scope of justice then become debates about whether different forms of human association are of the right kind to create agency in the relevant sense. Take the question of whether principles of social justice should apply to market transactions. If we see the market as a neutral arena in which many individual people freely pursue their own purposes, then the answer will be No. The only form of justice that arises will be justice in the conduct of each agent, who must avoid inflicting harm on others, must fulfil her contracts, and so forth. Whereas if we see the market as governed by a humanly-constructed system of rules that the participants collectively have the power to change – by legislation, for example – then we cannot avoid asking whether the outcomes it currently produces meet relevant standards of distributive justice, whatever we take these to be. A similar issue arises in the debate about over principles of global justice referred to above: is the current world order such that it makes sense to regard humanity as a whole as a collective agent responsible for the distributive outcomes it allows to occur?

Once institutions are established for the purpose (among other things) of delivering justice on a large scale, we can ask what duties of justice individual people have in consequence. Is their duty simply to support the institutions, and comply with whatever rules of conduct apply to them personally? Or do they have further duties to promote justice by acting directly on the relevant principles in their daily lives? No one doubts that some duties of justice fall directly on individuals, for example duties not to deceive or defraud when engaging in commercial transactions (and duties of corrective justice where behaviour is faulty), or duties to carry out one’s fair share of an informally organized project from which one expects to benefit, such as cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Others fall on them because they are performing a role within a social institution, for example the duty of an employer not to discriminate on grounds of race or gender when hiring workers, or the duty of a local government officer to assign public housing to those in greatest need. But what is much more in dispute is whether individual people have more extensive duties to promote social justice (for contrasting views, see Cohen 2008, ch. 3, Murphy 1998, Rawls 1993, Lecture VII, Young 2011, ch. 2).

Consider two cases: the first concerns parents who confer advantages on their children in ways that undermine fair equality of opportunity. If the latter principle of justice requires, to cite Rawls, that ‘those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin’ (Rawls 2001, p. 44) then there are myriad ways in which some parents can bestow advantages on their children that other parents cannot – financial benefits, educational opportunities, social contacts, and so forth – that are likely to bring greater success in later life. Are parents therefore constrained as a matter of justice to avoid conferring at least some of these advantages, or are they free to benefit their children as they choose, leaving the pursuit of equal opportunities entirely in the hands of the state (for a careful analysis, see Brighouse and Swift 2014)?

The second example concerns wage differentials. Might individuals whose talents can bring them high rewards in the labour market have a duty not to make use of their bargaining power, but instead be willing to work for a fair wage – which if fairness is understood in egalitarian terms might mean the same wage as everyone else (perhaps with extra compensation for those whose labour is unusually burdensome)? Rawls, as we saw above, argued that economic justice meant arranging social and economic inequalities to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and in formulating the principle in this way he assumed that some inequalities might serve as incentives to greater production that would also raise the position of the worst-off group in society. But if individuals were willing to forego incentives, and so economic inequalities served no useful purpose, then the arrangement that worked to the greatest benefit of the (otherwise) least advantaged would be one of strict equality. Cohen (2008) argues that Rawls’ position is internally inconsistent. As citizens designing our institutions we are supposed to be guided by the difference principle, but as private actors in the marketplace, we are permitted to ignore that principle and bargain for higher wages, even though doing so will work to the disadvantage of the worst-off group. Justice, according to Cohen, requires us to embrace an ethos of service that disdains material incentives.

Why might we hesitate before agreeing that in cases such as these, justice requires people to refrain from doing things that they are permitted to do by the public rules of their society (passing on benefits to their children; seeking higher wages)? One reason is that the refraining is only going to have a significant effect if it is practised on a large scale, and individuals have no assurance that others will follow their example; meanwhile they (or their children) will lose out relative to the less scrupulous. A connected reason has to do with publicity: it may be hard to detect whether people are following the required ethos or not (see Williams 1998). Is the person who sends her child to a private school because she claims he has special needs that the local state school cannot meet being sincere, or is she just trying to buy him comparative advantage? How can we tell whether the person who claims more money, but merely, he says, as compensation for the unusual stress that his work involves, is reporting honestly? (for Cohen’s response, see Cohen 2008, ch. 8) It appears, then, that there are principles of justice that apply to what Rawls calls ‘the basic structure of society [as] a public system of rules’ that do not apply in the same way to the personal behaviour of the individuals who live within that structure. Attending to the scope , as well as the content , of justice is important.

Recent philosophical writing on justice has drawn attention to forms of injustice that do not involve the material treatment that people receive, either from other persons or from institutions, but the harms they suffer through failures of recognition. They are impacted by social norms and social practices that diminish their sense of agency and induce them to see themselves as of lesser value than others. Here then justice is understood as being adequately and appropriately recognized, and injustice as involving failures of recognition, or in some cases ‘misrecognition’, when a person is placed in a category or assigned an identity that is not their own. In one influential formulation of this idea, ‘it is unjust that some individuals and groups are denied the status of full partners in social interaction simply as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value in whose construction they have not equally participated and which disparage their distinctive characteristics or the distinctive characteristics assigned to them’ (Fraser in Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 29).

What, then, does it mean to be recognized? In general it means to be viewed and treated by others in the way that is appropriate to the features that you possess, but most philosophers regard recognition as multidimensional. In particular, they distinguish between being recognized as an equal, where a person is accorded the kind of standing that gives them an equal status with other members of the relevant group, and being recognized for having characteristics, achievements or an identity that may be uniquely their own. Recognition in this second sense may involve the unequal granting of social esteem. Justice as recognition, therefore, is internally complex. At the social level, Axel Honneth distinguishes ‘three forms of social recognition, based in the sphere-specific principles of love, equal legal treatment, and social esteem’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003 p. 180)

The question that arises is how best to understand the relationship between justice of this kind and distributive justice, involving the allocation of material resources and so forth. For Honneth, justice as recognition is understood expansively so that it can also capture issues of economic justice, the thought being that the harm inflicted when, say, labour is not adequately rewarded can be understood as a failure to offer adequate recognition of the worker’s social contribution. For Nancy Fraser, by contrast, recognition and redistribution are seen as two mutually irreducible but jointly necessary conditions for social justice. Failures of recognition can be experienced by some among the economically privileged – such as ‘the African-American Wall Street banker who cannot get a taxi to pick him up’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003, p. 34). Justice as recognition requires cultural shifts in the way that different forms of identity and different types of achievement are valued that are independent of the institutional changes required to achieve distributive justice.

A particular form of recognitional injustice is epistemic injustice as diagnosed by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007). This occurs when someone is wronged in their capacity as a source of knowledge, and it takes two main forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. As Fricker explains ‘testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone as at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’ (Fricker 2007, p. 1). She argues that testimonial injustice matters for two reasons. First, the person who suffers from it is less able to protect or advance their interests – for example they are less likely to be believed when having to defend themselves in court. Second, since others are unwilling to regard them as competent sources of knowledge, they may lose trust in their own capacity to know, leading in some cases to ‘prolonged self-doubt and loss of intellectual confidence’.

Hermeneutical injustice arises in the context of unequal relationships in which the subordinated party lacks the concept or concepts needed to make sense of their experience (and thereby to challenge their subordination). Fricker uses the example of a woman who suffered sexual harassment at the time before feminists had developed that concept, and so had no adequate word to describe what she was experiencing. Hermeneutical injustice matters most when it is systematic, brought about by power inequalities that leave certain groups ‘hermeneutically marginalised’. However she treats epistemic justice as a virtue that individual hearers can develop, in contrast to recognition theorists like Fraser and Honneth for whom achieving recognitional justice requires collective action to change social and cultural norms on the part of misrecognized groups.

4. Utilitarianism and Justice

Can justice be understood in utilitarian terms? This may in the first place depend on how we interpret utilitarianism. We treat it here as a normative theory whose aim is to supply a criterion – the greatest happiness principle – that can be used, directly or indirectly, both by individuals and by institutions (such as states) in deciding what to do, rather than simply as a tool for evaluating states of affairs. Utilitarianism cannot plausibly provide a theory of justice unless it is interpreted in this action-guiding way, in light of what was said above about justice and agency. We also assume that the most likely candidate will be a rule-utilitarian view that treats principles of justice as belonging to the set of rules which when followed by the relevant agents will tend to produce the greatest total utility (for different ways of formulating this view, see the entry on rule consequentialism) .

Most utilitarians have regarded it as part of their task in defending utilitarianism to show that it can both accommodate and explain much of what we intuitively believe about justice. This is certainly true of two of the greatest among them, John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick, both of whom went to considerable lengths to show that familiar principles of justice could be given a utilitarian rationale (Mill Utilitarianism , ch. 5; Sidgwick 1874/1907, Book III, ch.5). Bentham, in contrast, was more cavalier: ‘justice, in the only sense in which it has a meaning, is an imaginary personage, feigned for the convenience of discourse, whose dictates are the dictates of utility, applied to certain particular cases’ ( The Principles of Morals and Legislation , pp. 125–6). If we follow the lead of Mill and Sidgwick in wishing to take seriously how justice is commonly understood, the utilitarian has two challenges to face. First he or she must show that the demands of justice as commonly understood correspond roughly to the rules that when followed by persons, or implemented by institutions, are most conducive to the greatest happiness. They need not mirror the latter exactly, because utilitarians will argue, as both Mill and Sidgwick did, that our intuitions about justice are often ambiguous or internally inconsistent, but there must be enough overlap to warrant the claim that what the utilitarian theory can accommodate and explain is indeed justice . (As Sidgwick (1874/1907, p. 264) put it, ‘we may, so to speak, clip the ragged edge of common usage, but we must not make excision of any considerable portion’.) Second, some explanation must be given for the distinctiveness of justice. Why do we have a concept that is used to mark off a particular set of requirements and claims if the normative basis for these requirements and claims is nothing other than general utility? What accounts for our intuitive sense of justice? The task confronting the utilitarian, then, is to systematize our understanding of justice without obliterating it.

By way of illustration, both Mill and Sidgwick recognize that desert , of both reward and punishment, is a key component of common understandings of justice, but they argue that if we remain at the level of common sense when we try to analyse it, we run into irresolvable contradictions. For instance, we are inclined to think that a person’s deserts should depend on what they have actually achieved – say the economic value of what they have produced – but also, because achievement will depend on factors for which the person in question can claim no credit, such as inborn talent, that their deserts should depend only on factors for which they are directly responsible, such as the amount of effort they expend. Each of these conceptions, when put into practice, would lead to a quite different schedule of rewards, and the only means to escape the impasse, these utilitarians claim, is to ask which schedule will generate most utility by directing people’s choices and efforts in the most socially productive way. Similar reasoning applies to the principles of punishment: the rules we should follow are the rules that are most conducive to the ends for which punishment is instituted, such as deterring crime.

To explain the distinctiveness of justice, Mill suggests that it designates moral requirements that, because of their very great importance to human well-being, people have a right to have discharged, and are therefore matters of perfect obligation. A person who commits an injustice is always liable to punishment of some kind, he argues. So he explains our sense of justice in terms of the resentment we feel towards someone who breaches these requirements. Sidgwick, who laid greater stress than Mill on the connection between justice and law, also underlined the relationship between justice and gratitude, on one side, and resentment, on the other, in order to capture the way in which our concern for justice seems to differ from our concern for utility in general.

Yet despite these efforts to reconcile justice and utility, three serious obstacles still remain. The first concerns what we might call the currency of justice: justice has to do with the way that tangible benefits and burdens are assigned, and not with the happiness or unhappiness that the assignees experience. It is a matter of justice, for example, that people should be paid the right amount for the jobs that they do, but, special circumstances aside, it is no concern of justice that John derives more satisfaction from his fairly-earned income than Jane does from hers (but see Cohen 1989 for a different view). There is so to speak, a division of labour, under which rights, opportunities, and material benefits of various kinds are allocated by principles of justice, while the conversion of these into units of utility (or disutility) is the responsibility of each individual recipient (see Dworkin 2000, ch. 1). Utilitarians will therefore find it hard to explain what from their point of view seems to be the fetishistic concern of justice over how the means to happiness are distributed, rather than happiness itself.

The second obstacle is that utilitarianism judges outcomes by totalling up utility levels, and has no independent concern for how that utility is distributed between persons. So even if we set aside the currency issue, utilitarian theory seems unable to capture justice’s demand that each should receive what is due to her regardless of the total amount of benefit this generates. Defenders of utilitarianism will argue that when the conduct-guiding rules are being formulated, attention will be paid to distributive questions. In particular, when resources are being distributed among people we know little about individually, there are good reasons to favour equality, since in most cases resources have diminishing marginal utility – the more of them you have, the less satisfaction you derive from additional instalments. Yet this is only a contingent matter. If some people are very adept at turning resources into well-being – they are so-called ‘utility monsters’ – then a utilitarian should support a rule that privileges them. This seems repugnant to justice. As Rawls famously put the general point, ‘each member of society is thought to have an inviolability founded on justice which….even the welfare of every one else cannot override’ (Rawls 1971, p. 28; Rawls 1999, pp. 24–25).

The third and final difficulty stems from utilitarianism’s thoroughgoing consequentialism. Rules are assessed strictly in the light of the consequences of adopting then, not in terms of their intrinsic properties. Of course, when agents follow rules, they are meant to do what the rule requires rather than to calculate consequences directly. But for a utilitarian, it is never going to be a good reason for adopting a rule that it will give people what they deserve or what they are entitled to, when desert or entitlement are created by events in the past, such as a person’s having performed a worthwhile action or entered an agreement. Backward-looking reasons have to be transmuted into forward-looking reasons in order to count. If a rule such as pacta sunt servanda (‘agreements must be kept’) is going to be adopted on utilitarian grounds, this is not because there is any inherent wrongness in defaulting on a compact one has made, but because a rule that compacts must be kept is a useful one, since it allows people to co-ordinate their behaviour knowing that their expectations about the future are likely to be met. But justice, although not always backward-looking in the sense explained, often is. What is due to a person is in many cases what they deserve for what they have done, or what they are entitled to by virtue of past transactions. So even if it were possible to construct a forward-looking rationale for having rules that closely tracked desert or entitlement as these are normally understood, the utilitarian still cannot capture the sense of justice – why it matters that people should get what is due to then – that informs our common-sense judgements.

Utilitarians might reply that their reconstruction preserves what is rationally defensible in common sense beliefs while what it discards are elements that cannot survive sustained critical reflection. But this would bring them closer to Bentham’s view that justice, as commonly understood, is nothing but a ‘phantom’.

5. Contractarianism and Justice

The shortcomings of utilitarianism have prompted several recent philosophers to revive the old idea of the social contract as a better way of bringing coherence to our thinking about justice. The idea here is not that people actually have entered a contract to establish justice, or that they should proceed to do so, but that we can understand justice better by asking the question: what principles to govern their institutions, practices and personal behaviour would people choose to adopt if they all had to agree on them in advance? The contract, in other words, is hypothetical; but the search for agreement is meant to ensure that the principles chosen would, when implemented, not lead to outcomes that people could not accept. Thus whereas a utilitarian might, under some circumstances, be prepared to support slavery – if the misery of the slaves were outweighed by the heightened pleasures of the slave-owners – contractarians claims that no-one could accept a principle permitting slavery, lest they themselves were destined to be slaves when the principle was applied.

The problem that contractarians face is to show how such an agreement is possible. If we were to ask people, in the real world, what principles they would prefer to live under, they are likely to start from a position of quite radical disagreement, given their interests and their beliefs. Some might even be willing to endorse slavery, if they were fairly certain that they would not end up as slaves themselves, or if they were sado-masochists who viewed the humiliations inflicted on slaves in a positive light. So in order to show how agreement could be achieved, contractarians have to model the contracting parties in a particular way, either by limiting what they are allowed to know about themselves or about the future, or by attributing to them certain motivations while excluding others. Since the modelling can be done differently, we have a family of contractarian theories of justice, three of whose most important members are the theories of Gauthier, Rawls and Scanlon.

Gauthier (1986) presents the social contract as a bargain between rational individuals who can gain through co-operating with one another, but who are competing over the division of the resulting surplus. He assumes that each is interested only in trying to maximise his own welfare, and he also assumes that there is a non-co-operative baseline from which the bargaining begins – so nobody would accept a solution that left her less well off than in the baseline condition. Each person can identify the outcome under which they fare best – their maximum gain – but they have no reason to expect others to accept that. Gauthier argues that rational bargainers will converge on the principle of Minimax Relative Concession , which requires each to concede the same relative proportion of their maximum possible gain relative to the non-co-operative baseline. Thus suppose there is a feasible arrangement whereby each participant can achieve two-thirds of their maximum gain, but no arrangement under which they all do better than that, then this is the arrangement that the principle recommends. Each person has made the same concession relative to the outcome that is best for them personally – not accepting the same absolute loss of welfare, let it be noted, but the same proportionate loss.

There are some internal difficulties with Gauthier’s theory that need to be recorded briefly (for a full discussion, see Barry 1989, esp. Part III). One is whether Minimax Relative Concession is in fact the correct solution to the bargaining problem that Gauthier introduces, as opposed to the standard Nash solution which (in a simple two-person case) selects the outcome in which the product of the two parties’ utilities is maximised (for discussion of different solutions to the bargaining problem, see the entry on contemporary approaches to the social contract , § 3.2). A second is whether Gauthier is able to justify positing a ‘Lockean’ baseline, under which each is assumed to respect the natural rights of the others, as the starting point for bargaining over the surplus – as opposed to a more conflictual ‘Hobbesian’ baseline in which individuals are permitted to use their natural powers to threaten one another in the process of establishing what each could expect to get in the absence of co-operation. But the larger question is whether a contract modelled in this way is an appropriate device for delivering principles of justice. On the one hand, it captures the idea that the practice of justice should work to everyone’s advantage, while requiring all those involved to moderate the demands they make on one another. On the other hand, it prescribes a final distribution of benefit that appears morally arbitrary, in the sense that A ’s bargaining advantage over B – which stems from the fact that his maximum possible gain is greater than hers – allows him to claim a higher level of benefit as a matter of justice . This seems implausible: there may be prudential reasons to recommend a distribution that reflects the outcome that self-interested and rational bargainers would arrive at, but claims of justice need a different basis.

John Rawls’ theory of justice is the most widely-cited example of a contractarian theory, but before outlining it, two words of caution are necessary. First, the shape of the theory has evolved from its first incarnation in Rawls (1958) through his major work A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) and on to Rawls (1993) and Rawls (2001). Second, although Rawls has consistently claimed that the principles of justice he defends are the principles that would be selected by people in a suitably designed ‘original position’ in which they are asked to choose the social and political institutions they will live under – this is what qualifies his theory as contractarian – it is less clear how important a role the contract itself plays in his thinking. His principles, which are discussed elsewhere (see the entry on John Rawls) , can be defended on their own merits as a theory of social justice for a modern liberal society, even if their contractual grounding proves to be unsound. Rawls presents the contracting parties as seeking to advance their own interests as they decide which principles to favour, but under two informational constraints. First, they are not allowed to know their own ‘conception of the good’ – what ends they personally find it most valuable to pursue – so the principles must be couched in terms of ‘primary goods’, understood as goods that it is better to have more rather than less of whatever conception of the good you favour. Second, they are placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that deprives them of any knowledge of personal characteristics, such as their gender, their place in society, or the talents and skills they possess. This means that they have no basis on which to bargain for advantage, and have to consider themselves as generic persons who might be male or female, talented or untalented, and so forth. In consequence, Rawls argues, all will choose to live under impartial principles that work to no-one’s advantage in particular.

The problem for Rawls, however, is to show that the principles that would be selected in such an original position are in fact recognizable as principles of justice . One might expect the parties to calculate how to weigh the primary goods (which Rawls catalogues as ‘rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth’) against each other, and then to choose as their social principle ‘maximise the weighted sum of primary goods, averaged across all persons’. This, however, would bring the theory very close to utilitarianism, since the natural method of weighing primary goods is to ask how much utility having a given quantity of each is likely, on average, to bring (for the claim that utilitarianism would be chosen in a Rawlsian original position, see Harsanyi 1975). Since Rawls wishes to reject utilitarianism, he has to adjust the psychology of the parties in the original position so that they reason differently. Thus he suggests that, at least in developed societies, people have special reason to prioritise liberty over the other goods and to ensure that it is equally distributed: he argues that this is essential to safeguard their self-respect. In later writing his argument is less empirical: now the parties to the contract are endowed with ‘moral powers’ that must be exercised, and it is then fairly easy to show that this requires them to have a set of basic liberties.

When he turns to the distribution of income and wealth, Rawls has to show why his choosers would pick the difference principle, which considers only the position of the worst-off social group, over other principles such as maximising average income across the whole society. In Theory of Justice he does this by attributing special psychological features to the choosers that make it appropriate for them to follow the ‘maximin’ rule for decisions under uncertainty (choose the option whose worst possible outcome is least bad for you). For example, they are said to be much more concerned to achieve the minimum level of income that the difference principle would guarantee them than to enjoy increases above that level. In his later work, he abandons this reliance on maximin reasoning and gives greater prominence to another argument hinted at in Theory . This portrays the contracting parties as starting out from the presumption that income and wealth should be distributed equally, but then recognizing that all can benefit by permitting certain inequalities to arise. When these inequalities are governed by the difference principle, they can be justified to everyone, including the worst off, thus creating the conditions for a more stable society. But we need then to ask why equal distribution should be treated as the benchmark, departures from which require special justification. When Rawls says that it is ‘not reasonable’ for any of the parties initially to expect more than an equal share (Rawls 1971, p. 150; Rawls 1999, p. 130), is this simply a corollary of their position as rational choosers behind a veil of ignorance, or has Rawls in addition endowed them with a substantive sense of justice that includes this presumption of equality?

Although Rawls throughout presents his theory of justice as contractarian, we can now see that the terms of the contract are in part determined by prior normative principles that Rawls engineers the parties to follow. So in contrast to Gauthier, it is no longer simply a case of self-interested contractors negotiating their way to an agreement. Rawls candidly admits that the contractual situation has to be adjusted so that it yields results that match our pre-existing convictions about justice. But then we may ask how much work the contractual apparatus is really doing (see Barry 1989, ch. 9 for a critical appraisal).

Scanlon (1998) does not attempt to deliver a theory of justice in the same sense as Rawls, but his contractarian account of that part of morality that specifies ‘what we owe to each other’ covers much of the same terrain (for an explicit attempt to analyse justice in Scanlonian terms, see Barry 1995). Like Rawls, Scanlon is concerned to develop an alternative to utilitarianism, and he does so by developing a test that any candidate moral principle must pass: it must be such that no-one could reasonably reject it as the basis for informed, unforced general agreement (see the entry on contractualism ). Scanlon’s contractors are not positioned behind a veil of ignorance. They are able to see what effect adopting any proposed principle would have on them personally. If that effect is unacceptable to them, they are permitted to reject it. Each person has, so to speak, a veto on any general principle for regulating conduct. Those that survive this test are defensible as principles of justice – Scanlon concedes that there might be alternative sets of such principles appropriate to different social conditions.

It might seem, however, that giving each person a veto would lead straightforwardly to deadlock, since anyone might reject a principle under which he fared badly relative to some alternative. Here the idea of reasonable rejection becomes important. It would not, Scanlon thinks, be reasonable to reject a principle under which one does badly if the alternatives all involve someone else faring worse still. One needs to take account of other people’s reasons for rejecting these alternatives. It might then appear that Scanlon’s contractualism yields the difference principle, which requires the worst-off group in society to be as well of as they can be. But this is not the conclusion that Scanlon draws (though he acknowledges that there might be special reasons to follow Rawls in requiring basic social institutions to follow the difference principle). The claims of other groups must be considered too. If a policy greatly benefits many others, while slightly worsening the position of a few, though without leaving them very badly off, it may well not be rejectable. Scanlon’s position leaves some room for aggregation – it makes a difference how many people will be benefitted if a principle is followed – though not the simple form of aggregation that utilitarians defend.

Scanlon also says that a person can have a reason for rejecting a principle if it treats them unfairly, say by benefitting some but not others for arbitrary reasons. This presupposes a norm of fairness that the contractarian theory does not itself attempt to explain or justify. So it looks as though the purpose of the theory is to provide a distinctive account of moral reasoning (and moral motivation) but not to defend any substantive principles of distributive justice. In this respect, Scanlon’s contractualism is less ambitious than either Gauthier’s or Rawls’.

6. Egalitarianism and Justice

In the recent past, many philosophers have sought to establish a close connection between justice and equality: they ask the question ‘what kind of equality does justice require?’, and to that several competing answers have been given (see, for example Cohen 1989, Dworkin 2000, Sen 1980). But we should not be too hasty to assume that what justice demands is always equality, whether of treatment or of outcome. Perhaps it does so only in a formal sense. As we saw in sect 1.3, justice requires the impartial and consistent application of rules, from which it follows that when two people are alike in all relevant respects, they must be treated equally. But, as Aristotle among others saw, justice also involves the idea of proportional treatment, which implies recipients getting unequal amounts of whatever good is at issue (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Book V, ch. 3). If A is twice as deserving or twice as needy as B , justice may require that she receives more than B does. So here formal equality of treatment – the same rule applied to both – leads to an unequal outcome. Again, when justice takes the conservative form of respect for existing entitlements or legitimate expectations (see para 2.1) there is no reason to anticipate that what is due to different people will be substantively the same.

So we need to ask about the circumstances in which justice requires a substantively equal distribution of advantages. One rather obvious case occurs when the members of the group within which the distribution is going to occur have no relevant distinguishing features, so there are no grounds on which some can claim greater shares of benefit than others. Suppose a group experiences a windfall gain for which no-one can claim any credit: a pot of gold somehow appears in their midst. Then unless any member can make a justice-related claim for a larger-than-equal share – say that she has special needs that she lacks sufficient resources to meet – an equal distribution of the gold is what justice demands, since any other distribution would be arbitrary. Equality here is the default principle that applies in the absence of any special claims that can be presented as reasons of justice.

Equality also acts as a default in circumstances where, although people may indeed have unequal claims to whatever good is being distributed, we have no reliable way of identifying and measuring those claims. By sharing the good equally, we can at least ensure that every claim has been partially satisfied. Thus suppose we have limited supplies of a drug that can treat malaria, and a number of patients displaying symptoms of the disease, but lacking specialised medical knowledge we cannot tell whether one person’s condition is more serious than another’s; then by sharing out the drug equally, we can guarantee that each person at least receives the highest fraction of what they really need. Any other distribution must leave at least one person with less (this of course assumes that there is no threshold amount of the drug beneath which it is ineffective; if that assumption is wrong, justice under the stated conditions might require a lottery in which the chosen ones receive threshold-size doses).

If justice requires equality only by default, it might seem to apply only in a narrow range of cases. How could egalitarian justice be made more robust? One approach involves declaring a wider range of factors irrelevant to just distribution. Thus one formulation of the principle holds that no-one should be worse-off than anyone else as a result of their ‘morally arbitrary’ characteristics, where a characteristic is morally arbitrary when its possessor cannot claim credit for having it. This captures a widespread intuition that people should not be advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their race or gender, but extends it (more controversially) to all personal features with a genetic basis, such as natural talents and inborn dispositions. In doing so, it discounts most claims of desert, since when people are said to deserve benefits of various kinds, it is usually for performing actions or displaying qualities that depend upon innate characteristics such as strength or intelligence. In the following section, we will see how egalitarian theories of justice have tried to incorporate some desert-like elements by way of response. But otherwise justice as equality and justice as desert appear to be in conflict, and the challenge is to show what can justify equal treatment in the face of inequalities of desert.

A second approach answers this challenge by explaining why it is positively valuable to afford people equal treatment even if they do display features that might appear to justify differential treatment. A prominent advocate of this approach is Dworkin, who argues that fundamental to justice is a principle of equal concern and respect for persons, and what this means in more concrete term is that equal resources should be devoted to the life of each member of society (Dworkin 2000). (The reference to membership here is not redundant, because Dworkin understands egalitarian justice as a principle that must be applied within sovereign states specifically – so in the terms of 3.2, this is a relational view of justice.) The thought is that showing persons equal respect may sometimes require us to afford them equal treatment, even in the face of relevant grounds for discrimination. Thus we insist on political equality – one person, one vote – even though we know that there are quite large differences in people’s competence to make political decisions.

As noted above, justice as simple equality of treatment seems open to the objection that it fails to acknowledge the agency of the recipients, who may have acted in ways that appear to qualify them to receive more (or less) of whatever benefit is being distributed. To answer this objection, several recent philosophers have presented alternative versions of ‘responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism’ – a family of theories of justice that treat equal distribution as a starting point but allow for departures from that baseline when these result from the responsible choices made by individuals (see Knight and Stemplowska 2011 for examples). These theories differ along several dimensions: the ‘currency of justice’ used to define the baseline of equality, the conditions that must be fulfilled for a choice to qualify as responsible, and which among the consequences that follow from a choice should count when the justice of an outcome is being assessed (it may in particular appear unjust to allow people to suffer the full consequences of bad choices that they could not reasonably have anticipated). The label that is often used to describe a sub-class of these theories is ‘luck egalitarianism’. According to luck egalitarians, justice requires that no-one should be disadvantaged relative to others on account of ‘brute’ bad luck, whereas inequalities that arise through the exercise of personal responsibility are permissible (for a full discussion of luck egalitarianism, see the entry on justice and bad luck ). ‘Brute’ luck is interpreted widely to include not only external circumstances such as one person’s initially having access to more resources than another, but also internal factors such as possessing natural abilities or disabilities, or having involuntarily acquired expensive tastes. All such inequalities are to be ironed out by redistribution or compensation, while people’s choices about how to use the assets they are granted should be respected, even if this leads to significant inequality in the long run.

Luck egalitarianism has proved surprisingly influential in recent debates on justice, despite the evident difficulties involved in, for example, quantifying ‘brute luck disadvantage’ in such a way that a compensatory scheme could be established. There are, however, a number of problems it has to face. By giving scope to personal responsibility, it seeks to capture what is perhaps the most attractive part of the conventional idea of desert – that people should be rewarded for making good choices and penalised for making bad ones – while filtering out the effects of having (undeserved) natural talents. But in reality the choices that people make are influenced by the talents and other qualities that they happen to have already. So if we allow someone to reap advantages by, for example, devoting long hours to learning to play the piano at a high level, we must recognize that this is a choice that she would almost certainly not have made unless early experiment showed that she was musically gifted. We cannot say what she would have chosen to do in a counterfactual world in which she was tone deaf. There seems then to be no coherent half-way house between accepting full-blooded desert and denying that people can justly claim relative advantage through the exercise of responsibility and choice (see further Miller 1999, ch. 7) .

A second problem is that one person’s exercise of responsibility may prove advantageous or disadvantageous to others, even though they have done nothing to bring this change about, so from their point of view it must count as ‘brute’ luck. This will be true, for example, in any case in which people are competing to excel in some field, where successful choices made by A will worsen the comparative position of B , C , and D . Or again, if A acts in a way that benefits B , but does nothing comparable to improve the position of C and D , then an inequality is created that counts as ‘brute bad luck’ from the perspective of the latter. One of the most influential exponents of luck egalitarianism seems to have recognized the problem in a late essay: ‘unlike plain egalitarianism, luck egalitarianism is paradoxical, because the use of shares by people is bound to lead to a distribution flecked by luck’ (Cohen 2011, p. 142).

We have seen that equality can sometimes be understood as required by justice; but it can also be valued independently. Indeed there can be circumstances in which the two values collide, because what justice demands is inequality of outcome. The kind of inequality that is independently valuable is social equality, best understood as a property of the relationships that prevail within a society: people regard and treat each other as social equals, and the society’s institutions are designed to foster and reflect such attitudes. A society of equals contrasts with one in which people belong to different ranks in a social hierarchy, and behave towards one another as their relative ranking prescribes. Different reasons can be given for objecting to social inequality, and conversely for valuing social equality (see Scanlon 2003).

Those who find equality valuable for reasons other than reasons of distributive justice are often described as ‘relational egalitarians’ (see Anderson 1999, Wolff 1998, Fourie, Schuppert and Wallimann-Helmer 2015). It is tempting to regard relational egalitarianism as a rival theory of justice to the luck egalitarian theory outlined in §6.2, but it may be more illuminating to see it instead as providing an alternative account of why we should care about limiting material inequality. Thus, faced with a world like the one we currently inhabit in which income differences are very large, justice theorists are likely to criticize these inequalities on grounds that they are not deserved, or arise from brute luck, etc., whereas relational egalitarians will say that they create a divided society in which people are alienated from each other, and cannot interact in a mutually respectful way. Relational equality does not address issues of distribution directly, and so cannot function as a theory of justice itself, but it can provide grounds for preferring one theory of justice to its rivals – namely that implementing that particular theory is more likely to create or sustain a society of equals.

We saw at the beginning of this article that justice can take a number of different forms, depending on the practical context in which it is being applied. Although we found common elements running through this diversity of use – most readily captured in Justinian’s ‘suum cuique ’ formula – these were formal rather than substantive. In these circumstances, it is natural to look for an overarching framework into which the various contextually specific conceptions of justice can all be fitted. Three such frameworks were examined: utilitarianism, contractarianism and egalitarianism. None, however, passed what we might call the ‘Sidgwick/Rawls test’, namely that of incorporating and explaining the majority at least of our considered convictions about justice – beliefs that we feel confident in holding about what justice requires us to do in a wide and varied range of circumstances (for Rawls’ version of the test see the entry on reflective equilibrium ). So unless we are willing to jettison many of these convictions in order to uphold one or other general framework, we will need to accept that no comprehensive theory of justice is available to us; we will have to make do with partial theories – theories about what justice requires in particular domains of human life. Rawls himself, despite the bold title of his first book ( A Theory of Justice ), came to recognize that what he had outlined was at best a theory of social justice applied to the basic institutional structure of a modern liberal state. Other forms of justice – familial, allocative, associational, international – with their associated principles would be applicable in their respective domains (for an even more explicitly pluralist account of justice, see Walzer 1983; for a fuller defence of a contextual approach to justice, see Miller 2013, esp. ch. 2).

One way to loosen up our thinking about justice is by paying greater attention to the history of the concept. We can learn a great deal by reading what Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Hume, has to say about the concept, but as we do so, we also see that elements we would expect to find are missing (there is nothing about rights in Aristotle, for example), while others that we would not anticipate are present. This may in some part be due to the idiosyncrasies of each thinker, but more importantly it reflects differences in the form of social life in which each was embedded – its economic, legal and political structure, especially. Various attempts have been made to write histories of justice that are more than just catalogues of what individual thinkers have said: they aim to trace and explain systematic shifts in the way that justice has been interpreted (for contrasting examples, see MacIntyre 1988, Fleischacker 2004, Johnston 2011). These should not be read as enlightenment stories in which our understanding of justice steadily improves as the centuries roll by. MacIntyre’s view, for example, is that modern liberal societies cannot sustain the practices within which notions of justice find their proper home. We can get a better grasp of what justice means to us by seeing the various conceptions that compete for our attention as tied to aspects of our social world that did not exist in the past, and are equally liable to disappear in the future.

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• –––, 1995, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Coleman, Jules, 1992, Risks and Wrongs , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka, 2011, Zoopolis: a political theory of animals rights , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Feinberg, Joel, 1970, “Justice and Personal Desert,” in Doing and Deserving: essays in the theory of responsibility , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1974, “Noncomparative Justice,” Philosophical Review , 83: 297–338.
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• Fourie, Carina, Fabian Schuppert and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (eds.), 2015, Social Equality: on what it means to be equals , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Frankfurt, Harry, 2015, On Inequality , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition? : a political-philosophical exchange , London: Verso.
• Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice; power and the ethics of knowing , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Garner, Robert, 2013, A Theory of Justice for Animals , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gauthier, David, 1986, Morals by Agreement , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Harsanyi, John, 1975, “Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of John Rawls’s Theory,” American Political Science Review , 69: 594–606.
• Hayek, Friedrich, 1976, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Volume II: The Mirage of Social Justice ), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature , edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• –––, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals , edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
• Johnston, David, 2011, A Brief History of Justice , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Kagan, Shelly, 2012, The Geometry of Desert , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Knight, Carl and Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), 2011, Responsibility and Distributive Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lind, E. Allan and Tom Tyler, 1988, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice , New York and London: Plenum Press.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1988, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , London: Duckworth.
• Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Representative Government , ed. A.D. Lindsay, London: Dent, 1964.
• Miller, David, 1999, Principles of Social Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2013, Justice for Earthlings: essays in political philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Montague, Phillip, 1980, “Comparative and Non-Comparative Justice,” Philosophical Quarterly , 30: 131–40.
• Murphy, Liam, 1998, “Institutions and the Demands of Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 27, 251–91.
• Nagel, Thomas, 2005, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 33, 113–47.
• Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 2006, Frontiers of Justice: disability, nationality, species membership , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Okin, Susan, 1989, Justice, Gender, and the Family , New York: Basic Books.
• Olsaretti, Serena (ed.), 2003, Justice and Desert , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Paul, Jeffrey (ed.), 1982, Reading Nozick : essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Perry, Stephen, 2000, “On the Relationship between Corrective and Distributive Justice,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Fourth Series , edited by Jeremy Horder, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Raphael, D. D., 2001, Concepts of Justice , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Rawls, John, 1958, “Justice as Fairness,” Philosophical Review , 67: 164–94.
• –––, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1993, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 1999, A Theory of Justice , revised edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2001, Justice as Fairness: a restatement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Ripstein, Arthur, 2004, “The Division of Responsibility and the Law of Tort,” Fordham Law Review , 72: 1811–44.
• Sandel, Michael, 1982, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Scanlon, T. M., 1998, What We Owe to Each Other , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2003, “The Diversity of Objections to Inequality,” in The Difficulty of Tolerance: essays in political philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sen, Amartya, 1980, “Equality of What?” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 1 , ed. S. McMurrin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sidgwick, Henry, 1874/1907, The Methods of Ethics , London: Macmillan.
• Valentini, Laura, 2014, “Canine Justice: An Associative Account,” Political Studies , 62: 37–52.
• Walzer, Michael, 1983, Spheres of Justice: a defence of pluralism and equality , New York: Basic Books.
• Williams, Andrew, 1998, “Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 27: 225–47.
• Wolff, Jonathan, 1991, Robert Nozick : property, justice and the minimal state , Cambridge: Polity.
• –––, 1998, “Fairness, Respect and the Egalitarian Ethos,” Philosophy and Public Affairs , 27: 97–122.
• Young, Iris Marion, 2011, Responsibility for Justice , New York: Oxford University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Justice , course lectures by Michael Sandel
• Justice Everywhere , a group blog about justice in public affairs

Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | consequentialism | consequentialism: rule | contractualism | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | justice: as a virtue | justice: distributive | justice: global | justice: intergenerational | justice: international distributive | justice: retributive | justice: transitional | luck: justice and bad luck | Rawls, John | reflective equilibrium | social contract: contemporary approaches to

Copyright © 2021 by David Miller < david . miller @ nuffield . ox . ac . uk >

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What is justice essay sample, example.

According to Dictionary.com, justice is synonymous to such concepts as righteousness, lawfulness, and equality. As an ethical category, justice can be defined as a principle of fairness, according to which similar cases should be treated alike, and a punishment should be proportionate to the offense; the same refers to rewards for achievements. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines justice as an impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments; the establishment or determination of rights according to the rules of law or equity. As a broader meaning, justice is defined as a conformity to the ideal of just or right doing.

Justice in its legal and ethical perspective can be defined as acting according to the ideal of fair-doing recognized in a particular society, and treating a person or his or her doings in accordance to this ideal and state laws. At the same time, justice, law, and norms are not equivalent; for example, a punishment for a crime judged fairly according to the existing laws does not necessarily look fair in the eyes of public, as it was in Anders Breivik’s case. Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in July, 2011, was sentenced to 21 years of imprisonment (The New York Times), which is unfairly unequal to the scale of the crime he committed.

Referring to justice in its socioeconomic aspect, it is rather difficult to provide an unequivocal definition, as most of them are closely connected to various political and economic doctrines. Simply put, justice can be defined as a way of allocating and distributing material and intangible benefits (such as education, employment opportunities, access to political life) in a society in a way that does not infringe or insult any individual.

Justice is a concept which can be understood in different ways, especially in its socioeconomic perspective. Also, justice can be defined as acting according to the ideal of fair-doing recognized in a particular society, and treating a person or their doings in accordance to this ideal and state laws. In its economical aspect, justice is a way of distributing material and intangible goods in a way that does not insult anyone. As you can see, justice is multifaceted.

To get more samples of similar writings, visit some of the top homework service reviews. You will find everything there that can help you create an engaging and interesting text.

Lewis, Mark, and Sarah Lyall. “Norway Mass Killer Gets the Maximum: 21 Years.” The New York Times. N.p., 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 12 July 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/world/europe/anders-behring-breivik-murder-trial.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

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Michael J. Sandel

Anne t. and robert m. bass professor of government, introduction: "justice with michael sandel".

Lectures 1 & 2

Lecture 1 – The Moral Side of Murder Would you kill one person to save the lives of five others? Would it be the right thing to do? Inviting students to respond to some amusing hypothetical scenarios, Professor Michael Sandel launches his course on moral reasoning.

Lecture 2 – The Case for Cannibalism Sandel introduces the principles of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham with a famous nineteenth century law case involving a shipwrecked crew of four. After nineteen days lost at sea, the captain decides to kill the cabin boy, the weakest amongst them, so they can feed on his blood and body to survive.

The Lifeboat Case

Justice dilemma 1.

Lectures 3 & 4

Lecture 3 – Putting a Price Tag on Life Sandel presents some contemporary cases in which cost-benefit analysis was used to put a dollar value on human life. The cases give rise to several objections to the utilitarian logic of seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Is it possible to sum up and compare all values using a common measure like money?

Lecture 4 – How to Measure Pleasure Sandel introduces J. S. Mill, a utilitarian philosopher who argues that seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number” is compatible with protecting individual rights, and that utilitarianism can make room for a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. 

The Cost of Life & the EPA

The cost of life & the epa: utilitarianism (lecture 3).

Opera & Dogfights

82cf0058474506c8f3fa2361d4c45e40.

Lectures 5 & 6

Lecture 5 – Free to Choose With humorous references to Bill Gates and Michael Jordan, Sandel introduces the libertarian notion that redistributive taxation—taxing the rich to help the poor—is akin to forced labor.

Lecture 6 – Who Owns Me? Are the successful morally entitled to the benefits that flow from the exercise of their talents? What about the fact that wealth is often due to good luck or fortunate family circumstances? A group of students dubbed “Team Libertarian” defend the libertarian philosophy against this objection.

Motorcycle Helmets

Motorcycle helmets: libertarianism (lecture 5).

Sports Money & Taxes

Sports money & taxes: libertarianism (lecture 6).

Lectures 7 & 8

Lecture 7 – This Land is My Land The philosopher John Locke argues that individuals have certain fundamental rights—to life, liberty, and property—that were given to us in “the state of nature,” a time before government and laws were created.  How then can private property arise?  Lecture 8 – Consenting Adults If we all have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, how can government enact laws that tax or earnings or send us to war? Does this amount to taking our property or our lives without our consent? 

Property Rights & Boston Parking

Lectures 9 & 10

Lecture 9 – Hired Guns?  During the Civil War, men drafted into war had the option of hiring substitutes to fight in their place. Many students say they find that policy unjust, arguing that it is unfair to allow the affluent to pay less privileged citizens to fight in their place.  Is today’s voluntary army open to the same objection?  

Lecture 10 – For Sale: Motherhood Sandel examines free-market exchange as it relates to reproductive rights. Examples include the business of egg and sperm donation and the case of “Baby M”—a famous law case that raised the unsettling question, “Who owns a baby?” 

Military Service: Markets & Morals

Surrogacy: Market & Morals

Surrogacy: market & morals (lecture 10).

Lectures 11 & 12

Lecture 11: Mind Your Motive Sandel introduces Immanuel Kant, a challenging but influential philosopher.  For Kant morality means acting out of duty—doing something because it is right, not because it is prudent or convenient.  Kant gives the example of a shopkeeper who passes up the chance to shortchange a customer only because his business might suffer if other customers found out.  According to Kant, the shopkeeper’s action lacks moral worth, because he did the right thing for the wrong reason.

Lecture 12: The Supreme Principle of Morality Immanuel Kant says that insofar as our actions have moral worth, what confers moral worth is our capacity to rise above self-interest and inclination and to act out of duty.  Using several real life examples, Sandel explains Kant’s test for determining whether an action is morally right: to identify the principle expressed in our action and then ask whether that principle could ever become a universal law that every other human being could act on.

The Shopkeeper's Action

The shopkeeper's action: immanuel kant (lecture 11).

Kant and Human Dignity: The Case of Torture

Kant and human dignity.

Lectures 13 & 14

Lecture 13 – A Lesson in Lying Immanuel Kant believed that telling a lie, even a white lie, is a violation of one’s own dignity. Sandel asks students to test Kant’s theory with this hypothetical case: if a friend were hiding inside your home, and a murderer came to your door and asked you where he was, would it be wrong to lie to him? This leads to a video clip of one of the most famous, recent examples of dodging the truth: President Clinton talking about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Lecture 14 – A Deal is a Deal Sandel introduces the modern philosopher, John Rawls, who argues that a just society is one governed by principles we would choose if we did not know what advantages we would possess or what role in society we would occupy. 

Lying to a Murderer

Lying to a murderer: immanuel kant (lecture 12 & 13).

David Hume & the Contractor

David hume & the contractor: the morality of consent (lecture 14).

Lectures 15 & 16

Lecture 15 – What's a Fair Start? Rawls argues that even a meritocracy—a distributive system that rewards effort—doesn’t go far enough in leveling the playing field because the successful can’t claim to deserve the talents that enable them to get ahead.  Success often depends on factors as arbitrary as birth order. Sandel makes Rawls’s point when he asks the students who were first born in their family to raise their hands.

Lecture 16 – What do We Deserve? Sandel discusses the fairness of pay differentials in modern society. He compares the salary of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ($200,000) with the salary of television’s Judge Judy ($25 million). Sandel asks, is this fair? 

A Thought Experiment

A thought experiment: john rawls (lecture 15).

Inheritance Tax

Inheritance tax: who deserve what (lecture 16).

Lectures 17 & 18

Lecture 17 - Arguing Affirmative Action Is it just to consider race and ethnicity as factors in college admissions? Students discuss the pros and cons of affirmative action and discuss some controversial court cases. 

Lecture 18 - What's the Purpose? Sandel introduces Aristotle and his theory of justice. Aristotle disagrees with Rawls and Kant. He believes that justice is about giving people their due, what they deserve. The best flutes, for example, should go to the best flute players. And the highest political offices should go to those with the best judgment and the greatest civic virtue. 

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action (lecture 17).

The Violin: The Good Citizen (Lecture 18 & 19)

Lectures 19 & 20

Lecture 19 - The Good Citizen Aristotle believes the purpose of politics is to promote and cultivate the virtue of its citizens. The  telos or goal of the state and political community is the “good life”. And those citizens who contribute most to the purpose of the community are the ones who should be most rewarded. But how do we know the purpose of a community or a practice? Aristotle’s theory of justice leads to a contemporary debate about golf. Sandel describes the case of a disabled golfer who sued the PGA after it declined his request to use a golf cart.

Lecture 20 - Freedom VS. Fit  How does Aristotle address the issue of individual rights and the freedom to choose? In this lecture, Sandel addresses one of the most glaring objections to Aristotle—his defense of slavery as a fitting social role for certain human beings. Students discuss other objections to Aristotle’s theories and debate whether his philosophy overly restricts the freedom of individuals.

Casey Martin and the Telos of Golf

Casey martin and the telos of golf: aristotle (lecture 20).

Lectures 21 & 22

Lecture 21 – The Claims of Community Are all obligations based on consent, or are we also bound by unchosen obligations of membership and solidarity?

Lecture 22 – Where Our Loyalty Lies Do we owe more to our fellow citizens that to citizens of other countries? Is patriotism a virtue, or a prejudice for one’s own kind? Do I have a special responsibility for righting the wrongs of my great grandparents’ generation?

Justice, Community, and Membership

Citizen responsibility: justice, community, and membership (lecture 21).

Honesty vs. Loyalty?

Friendship & honesty: dilemmas of loyalty (lecture 22).

Collective Responsibility?

Collective responsibility for past wrongs.

Lectures 23 & 24

Lecture 23 – Debating Same-Sex Marriage If principles of justice depend on the moral or intrinsic worth of the ends that rights serve, how should we deal with the fact that people hold different ideas and conceptions of what is good? Students address this question in a debate about same-sex marriage. Can we settle the matter without discussing the moral status of homosexuality and the purpose of marriage?

Lecture 24 – The Good Life In his final lecture, Sandel challenges the notion that government and law should be neutral on hard moral questions. He argues that engaging, rather than avoiding, the moral convictions of our fellow citizens may be the best way of seeking a just society.

Debating Same Sex Marriage

Debating same sex marriage (lecture 23).

"More than exhilarating; exciting in its ability to persuade this student/reader, time and again, that the principle now being invoked—on this page, in this chapter—is the one to deliver the sufficiently inclusive guide to the making of a decent life." (Vivian Gornick, Boston Review )

“Sandel explains theories of justice…with clarity and immediacy; the ideas of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Robert Nozick and John Rawls have rarely, if ever, been set out as accessibly…. In terms we can all understand, ‘Justice’ confronts us with the concepts that lurk, so often unacknowledged, beneath our conflicts.”  (Jonathan Rauch, New York Times )

“Sandel dazzles in this sweeping survey of hot topics…. Erudite, conversational and deeply humane, this is truly transformative reading.” ( Publishers Weekly , starred review)

“A spellbinding philosopher…. For Michael Sandel, justice is not a spectator sport…. He is calling for nothing less than a reinvigoration of citizenship.”  (Samuel Moyn, The Nation )

“Michael Sandel, perhaps the most prominent college professor in America…practices the best kind of academic populism, managing to simplify John Stuart Mill and John Rawls without being simplistic. But Sandel is best at what he calls bringing ‘moral clarity to the alternatives we confront as democratic citizens ’…. He ends up clarifying a basic political divide -- not between left and right, but between those who recognize nothing greater than individual rights and choices, and those who affirm a ‘politics of the common good,' rooted in moral beliefs that can't be ignored.”  (Michael Gerson, Washington Post)

" Justice , the new volume from superstar Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, showcases the thinking on public morality that has made him one of the most sought-after lecturers in the world." (Richard Reeves, Democracy )

“Hard cases may make bad law, but in Michael Sandel’s hands they produce some cool philosophy…. Justice is a timely plea for us to desist from political bickering and see if we can have a sensible discussion about what sort of society we really want to live in.”  (Jonathan Ree, The Observer (London))

“Every once in a while, a book comes along of such grace, power, and wit that it enthralls us with a yearning to know what justice is.  This is such a book.”  (Jeffrey Abramson, Texas Law Review )

“Using a compelling, entertaining mix of hypotheticals, news stories, episodes from history, pop-culture tidbits, literary examples, legal cases and teachings from the great philosophers—principally, Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, Mill and Rawls—Sandel takes on a variety of controversial issues—abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action—and forces us to confront our own assumptions, biases and lazy thought…. Sparkling commentary from the professor we all wish we had.”  ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review) 

“Michael Sandel is…one of the world's most interesting political philosophers. Politicians and commentators tend to ask two questions of policy: will it make voters better off, and will it affect their liberty? Sandel rightly points out the shallowness of that debate and adds a third criterion: how will it affect the common good?”  ( Guardian)

“Michael Sandel transforms moral philosophy by putting it at the heart of civic debate…. Sandel belongs to the tradition, dating back to ancient Greece, which sees moral philosophy as an outgrowth and refinement of civic debate. Like Aristotle, he seeks to systematize educated common sense, not to replace it with expert knowledge or abstract principles.  This accounts for one of the most striking and attractive features of Justice —its use of examples drawn from real legal and political controversies…. Sandel's insistence on the inescapably ethical character of political debate is enormously refreshing.”  (Edward Skidelsky, New Statesman)  

“His ability to find the broad issues at the heart of everyday concerns verges on the uncanny, and his lucid explanations of classic figures such as Mill, Kant, and Aristotle are worth the price of admission.”  (William A. Galston, Commonweal ) 

“A remarkable educational achievement…. Generations of students and educated citizens will be very well served by Sandel’s introductory overviews.”  (Amitai Etzioni, Hedgehog Review )

“Reading ‘Justice’ by Michael Sandel is an intoxicating invitation to take apart and examine how we arrive at our notions of right and wrong….This is enlivening stuff. Sandel is not looking to win an argument; he's looking at how a citizen might best engage the public realm.” (Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer )

“Sandel is a champion of a politics of the common good. He wants us to think of ourselves as citizens, not just consumers or isolated choosers.  For him, justice demands that we ask what kind of people and society we want (or ought) to be.”  (John A. Coleman, America )

 “Michael Sandel, political philosopher and public intellectual, is a liberal, but not the annoying sort.  His aim is not to boss people around but to bring them around to the pleasures of thinking clearly about large questions of social policy.  Reading this lucid book is like taking his famous undergraduate course ‘Justice’ without the tiresome parts, such as term papers and exams.”  (George F. Will, syndicated columnist)

“ Justice is Sandel at his finest: no matter what your views are, his delightful style will draw you in, and he’ll then force you to rethink your assumptions and challenge you to question accepted ways of thinking. He calls us to a better way of doing politics, and a more enriching way of living our lives.”  (E. J. Dionne, syndicated columnist)

“His is a new and authentic philosophical voice…. Michael Sandel’s elegantly argued book…describes what I take to be the reality of moral experience.” – Michael Walzer, The New Republic

“Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is a gracefully—even beautifully—written book that I would imagine is destined to be something of a classic on the subject.” – Chilton Williamson, Jr., National Review

“Sandel’s book is exemplary.  It is passionate and unrelenting, and yet meticulous and scrupulous in its argumentation…. [A]lways fair to its target, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice develops the best and most constructive interpretations with which to disagree…. It is the great virtue of this book, of its justness and generosity of spirit, that…one can come away from this book moved to deepen and improve the vision he criticizes.” – Charles Fried, Harvard Law Review  

“This brilliantly written critique of Rawls…can be read as an important contribution toward the reconstruction of liberal political theory.” – Steven M. DeLue, American Political Science Review  

“Sandel’s remarkable work forces us to take seriously the question: what kind of subjects must we be for our talk of justice and rights to make sense? He uncovers the strains and contractions in much contemporary liberalism. This is political philosophy on the level it should be written, confronting our moral beliefs with our best understanding of human nature.” – Charles Taylor, McGill University

“A genuinely important and philosophical book…written with style and precision…. Sandel’s account of friendship and self-knowledge is luminous.” – Ronald Beiner, Times Higher Education Supplement

“[S]ometimes soaring to exhilarating eloquence and flashes of insight… Liberalism and the Limits of Justice offers fresh and plausible readings of what politics is and might be.” – Stephen Whitfield, Worldview  

“Sandel [goes to] the heart of the epistemological confusions inherent in modern philosophical liberalism…. The real consequence of Sandel’s argument is…to reassert [the] fundamental lesson…that at the heart of all philosophy is political philosophy. – Mark Lilla, The Public Interest

“Sandel’s outstanding book is a significant and fascinating contribution…. Sandel’s point about the liberal conception of the self is exciting and significant in several ways.” – Richard Fentiman, Cambridge Law Journal

“Sandel offers an extended, very penetrating critique of what he calls the ‘deep individualism’ embedded in the premises of Rawlsian theory—and, more generally, in the foundations of liberal political theories which are influenced by Kantian moral philosophy.  This is fresh work of major importance to the ongoing discussion of justice and individualism….” – Norman Care, No ûs

“This clear and forceful book provides very elegant and cogent arguments against the attempt to use a certain conception of the self, a certain metaphysical view of what human beings are like, to legitimate liberal politics.” – Richard Rorty, in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth  

“[John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice ] is widely viewed as the most important work of political philosophy to be written in our time.  It certainly has been the most widely discussed.  Of all the commentary it has spawned, none has been more important than the critique offered by Michael Sandel in a book published in 1982 called Liberalism and the Limits of Justice , which succeeded in calling into question some of Rawls’s more fundamental premises.” – R. Bruce Douglass, Commonwealth  

“Sandel’s work builds very strongly on A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, taking its place as the next voice in the running conversation of political theory…. Where critiques are often used by their author as a means to build their own name up by tearing down someone else’s name, Sandel’s is such a careful study that it ends up enhancing the stature of the work it builds upon.” – Chistopher Budd, The Philosophers’ Magazine

“Even though Sandel is critical of Rawls, he is scrupulously fair and respectful…. One cannot read Liberalism and the Limits of Justice without acquiring a deeper and clearer understanding of Rawls’ theory…. Sandel’s impressive work…illuminates not only Rawls’ theory but also the nature of moral argument…. It is an outstanding achievement.” – William Powers, Texas Law Review

Justice for All

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

It would be easy to fault the Founders for not mentioning women in that statement, unless we remember that to their way of thinking, “men” and “mankind” were acceptable ways to describe groups that include men, women, and children. We might also fault them for allowing slavery to persist, even as they wrote a document about human freedom. What we should keep in mind, however, is that we base our belief that slavery is wrong on the very ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Even though some of their beliefs don’t fit our modern sensibilities, the Founders embraced world-changing ideas about justice and freedom. To appreciate this, it is helpful to understand how people were governed in the centuries before America’s Founding.

The scales of justice are a symbol for the justice system in the United States.

Throughout history, most people have been treated unequally by their rulers. Unless one were born into a privileged family or tribe, there was little access to the precious resources that are taken for granted in a prosperous society—things like meat, well-defended shelter, and education. In many cases people might be enslaved, or something close to it. People were treated unequally, both so that the powerful could have more comfort, and because rulers believed most people couldn’t be trusted to make decisions about how society should operate.

As we have seen, the Founders declared that no one has a right to rule others simply because of the family into which he’s born. Instead, they believed that everyone is born with certain rights and that the law should equally protect people’s freedoms and property.

“That alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own” (James Madison, “On Property,” 1792).

This was important to the Founders because they believed government exists not only to make rules; but also to ensure justice.

The Constitution protects justice for all citizens in the United States.

As American ideas about equality changed, we enacted laws to free American slaves and to extend voting rights to women and those without property. We moved to stop government agencies from treating African Americans unequally, whether by denying them the right to vote, denying them access to city-owned hospitals, or simply failing to extend to them the same police protection enjoyed by other citizens.

A long period of mistreatment had contributed to substantial poverty in African-American communities, and this was not the only inequality in the United States. A growing economy presents numerous opportunities for people to start new businesses, or find ways to earn money using their particular skills and ideas. Just as varied abilities (and sometimes luck) ensure that different players on a baseball team will score different numbers of runs—even when they’re all playing by the same rules—a free economy yields different rewards. It offers substantial benefits to everyone participating in it, but especially large rewards for people whose luck, skill, or perseverance makes them exceptional.

Despite the Great Depression and two world wars, Americans—even the poorest Americans—saw their standard of living rise tremendously during the twentieth century. Our understanding of equality and fairness was changing, however. While the Founders believed government should protect everyone’s  rights  impartially, many Americans came to believe that  outcomes  should be more equal. We began to take money from some individuals to give to others, and to offer special benefits, like preferential treatment for minority-owned firms seeking government contracts. In order to achieve more equitable outcomes, in other words, our government began to treat people unequally.

Some people see this as necessary to pursue equal treatment. Their point is that if the game has been rigged to keep some people from scoring, it is not fair to just start treating everyone equally, because some are now behind in the game. Efforts to redistribute wealth and adjust racial, ethnic, and gender proportions in workplaces and even sports teams are, they believe, necessary to achieve the Founders’ vision of a society where everyone has equal protection under the law.

This statue on front of a courthouse is holding the scales of justice and her eyes are covered. What do you think her blindfold represents?

Others argue that two wrongs do not make a right, and that we are punishing people who did nothing wrong for the sins of their ancestors. People are getting accustomed to living on government programs, they say, creating long-term dependency.

Americans disagree about what our government should do—if anything—given the unequal outcomes that naturally occur in a free society. Thankfully, the Founders crafted a political system we can use to work out our disagreements. What we should avoid, meanwhile, is taking for granted that we will always enjoy the equality our Founders promoted. We each depend on our government to protect our rights equally, but we have to remember that this depends, in turn, on citizens upholding that ideal.

For example, if we see someone who is charged with governing others—whether a senator, a mayor, or even a homeowners association president—allow favored members of the community to get by without following rules, or, worse still, make rules designed to hurt those they disfavor, we should question the justice of this.

Even if we turn out to be mistaken, citizens must be willing to ask such questions, if only to remind ourselves—and our elected officials—that equal treatment before the law is essential to freedom.

Related Content

By examining primary source documents, students will analyze the Founders’ concept of justice, liberty, and rights; where those concepts came from; and how they have changed over time.

673 Justice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best justice topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on justice, 📃 interesting topics to write about justice, 💡 simple & easy justice essay titles, 📌 writing prompts about justice, 🥇 most interesting justice topics to write about.

• Ethical Dilemmas in Criminal Justice If one is to discuss the issue with the senior management of the organization in which the crime occurred, there is a high chance that the issue will not be taken as seriously due to […]
• John Rawls’ Theory of Justice 1 This is a classless principle calling for justice equality promoting mutual understanding; nevertheless, taken the way it is, this principle would confuse people on some issues and this is why Rawls compliments it with […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Justice and Vengeance: What Is the Difference? The difference between these two deeds is that justice is administered according to the society’s law, but with a vengeance, one tends to take the law into their own hands, and rage controls those deeds […]
• Importance of Math in the Field of Criminal Justice The work of police officers and other personnel in criminal justice requires proof and accuracy in determining the cause and effects of a crime.
• Retributive Justice vs. Rehabilitation of Criminals The aim of the criminal justice system is to convert an offender into a law-abiding citizen, and thus rehabilitation is the best approach in various ways.
• Love and Justice Love and justice are intertwined and this essay will explain the Christian understanding of love and justice. It is worth noting that love and justice are important virtues in human life and as such should […]
• Guardians and Justice in Plato’s “The Republic” The books begin with the discussion of the ideal city and more importantly, the concept of justice. As a result, justice of the soul and the individual is achieved.
• Justice Favors the Rich Michael Vick’s case displayed just how long the legal system had take long to act on high-profile persons as it would to the rest of the population.
• Social Justice in Education With a clear distinction between justice taught in class and justice allowed to thrive in the school environments, teachers can be able to observe how their students perceive and response to social injustices in the […]
• Application of Probability and Statistics in Criminal Justice In criminal justice system, the assessment of the evidence adduced by witnesses determines the innocence or the guilt of the accused.
• Peace and Justice Revolving around a prominent hotel in Kigali, George features Don Cheadle as the manager of the hotel and a representative of the majority Hutus, the wealthy tribe that enjoys majority of the country’s resources.
• Justice in “Latin Night at the Pawnshop” by Espada One of them is justice, which is indicated by the setting, the imagery, the symbolism, and the effective simile. The juxtaposition of the time and the place highlights the injustice experienced by the former.
• Justice in “Letter From Birmingham Jail” by King The main topic of the letter is the discussion of the issue of justice and injustice.Dr. In the discussion of just and unjust laws, Dr.
• Criminal Justice Ethics Definition Criminal justice ethics involves all the codes as well as standards that apply to all the concerned parties in the criminal justice system for example attorneys, prosecutors, and the other entire professionals in the criminal […]
• Theories of Justice: Utilitarian theory With utilitarian theory being one of the theories of justice, the need to know how the theory offers justice to people, how it determines the conduct between individuals and the challenges the theory is facing […]
• The Instrumental Theory in Criminal Justice In criminal justice, the instrumental theory is based on the idea that criminal justice and criminology is one of the main tools which help to control the poor.
• A Critique of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice These principles are the principles of social justice; they provide a way of assigning duties and privileges in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of […]
• “Death and Justice” by Edward I. Koch Although the issue of the death penalty is quite controversial, it is the most effective deterrence and the fairest justice that can be done to the victims of the most serious offenses.
• Justice in “The Trial” by Franz Kafka One of the central themes in The Trial is the theme of bureaucracy, law, and an individual’s utter powerlessness against them.
• The Philosophical Problems Behind Annette Bayer’s Article ‘the Need For More Than Justice’ Whereas males take moral decisions according to the idea of justice, women are ruled by the sense of trust and caring. The problem of care is considered by many feminist philosophers and is the characteristic […]
• Socrates’ Conception of Law and Justice Socrates advocated the idea that justice was good, and that meant that injustice was equal to evil. The point he makes here is that justice is the cure for evil, and that a man who […]
• The Trial by Franz Kafka and Its Reference to Current Justice System The novel offers a distorted version of the court system, where the readers focus on the trial process, although the opening part of the story already focuses on the ambiguity of the situation.
• Crime Scene Investigation in Criminal Justice In the process of controlling the crowd and maintaining order with the aid of the police officers, I took some photographs of the surrounding and then approached the main spot of event. I managed to […]
• Ethics and Professional Behavior in Criminal Justice One of the most important components of the criminal justice system is a code of ethics, which governs the behavior and conduct of professionals working within the system.
• Justice in the Old and New Testament As such, it is prudent to compare the two definitions in detail to understand the overt and underlying differences between the two halves of the Christian canon better. Both the Old and the New Testaments […]
• Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development in Justice System Burglars, whose predominant level of morality is conventional, tend to consider the opinion of the society on their actions. Kohlberg’s stages of moral development help to identify the problems and find solutions to them.
• Advocating for Social Justice in Healthcare However, health care is also often related to the idea of social justice a term that describes the allocation of resources and benefits to people according to their needs and abilities.
• Retributive Justice vs. Restorative Justice I believe that the concept of retributive justice is more realistic for the justice system as it dwells on the idea of crime as a malfunction in a governmentally-controlled human social system.
• Justice as Fairness By John Rawls The question of justice will mostly arise when the interests of individuals are self-centered and none of them is willing to give it up for the benefit of the other.
• Aristotelian Defense of Justice: Strengths and Weaknesses The first aspect of Aristotelian defense of justice, which is crucial to discuss, is the fact that, according to the philosopher, justice is relative to others.
• Psychologists’ Role in Criminal Justice In addition to research, the accumulation, and application of knowledge, psychologists can also participate in assessing the effectiveness of legislation. In this setting, basic scientists conduct theoretical research on the effectiveness of police and court […]
• System of Justice in Kaplan’s Movie “The Accused” In the movie, the conventional retributive system of justice is used to deal with the case of sexual assault. Taking into consideration the seriousness of the crimes, it seems not relevant to apply the restorative […]
• Sandel’s “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” From this point, the criteria for judging the book are the following ones: the author’s approach to discussing the theories of justice and attractiveness of the proposed form of narration to the reader.
• Challenges in the Juvenile Justice System Therefore, the juvenile justice system was established which was aimed at diverting the children from the trauma of going through the adult court and the influences of adult prisons.
• Criminal Justice System Representation in Media In the television shows and films examined in this paper, the creators attempt to display various aspects of the criminal justice system realistically and positively.
• Net Widening in the Juvenile Justice System Thus, net widening can be a rather problematic phenomenon as more and more people are placed under the control of the justice system.
• Ethical Decision Making: Restorative Justice Thus, the restorative justice process offers the victims a meeting with the offender to determine the validity of the judgment based on the involved moral grounds.
• Global Justice in Modern World The Concept of Globalization Globalization can be defined as the minimization of the differences between people of the world and the maximization of their similarities through interactions, cooperation and communication.
• Social Justice: The Catholic’s Social Teachings on Justice The church also seeks to instill value in the prisoners’ lives through teachings and practices that accept prisoners as people who deserve to be treated with dignity.
• Effective Communication in Criminal Justice Settings The officer should also package information in a way that it is easy to decode and understand. Such communication enables police officers in charge of the inmates to access important information from them.
• A Defence of Thrasymachus Concept of Justice As they argue with Socrates on the issue of injustice, Thrasymachus says that justice “is nothing more than the advantage of the stronger”. According to them, the cardinal aim of Thrasymachus is to prove that […]
• Cybercrime Impact on Global Criminal Justice System Reports show that the crime is on the rise because more people have access to computers and the internet than ever before.
• Ethical Issues of the Juvenile Justice Policy Reform The evaluation of the programs of the juvenile justice policy reform depends on the lacunas in the systems and then evaluating the effecting the efficacy of the various measures adopted to address various issues confronting […]
• Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System The legal processes indicated above ranges from proceedings in the courts to investigations conducted by the police and also to the management of prisoners.
• Violence and Justice in The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell Considering this, the novel conveys the overall impact of the brutality on the minds of human beings, as part of society, by raising a question of the justifiable murder.
• Administration of Justice Organizations It can provide helpful knowledge for understanding the legal system of the state and how this aspect affects the development of the country and society.
• Justice and Injustice in Genesis 4: The Story of Cain and Abel According to the Bible, both Cain and Abel brought their offerings to the Lord, but only the latter gained respect, provoking such feelings as envy and anger in the former, which made the Lord an […]
• Relation Between Justice and Inequality The structure of institutions needs to be changed in that everyone can relate hence creating a rift in the judgment delivered between the rich and the poor is unproductive.
• Society’s Response to Crime Impacts on Justice True, the decisions of the court are generally based on nature of the crime, evidence and the manner of the plaintiff and defendant.
• Juvenile Justice System Challenges Ignoring the facts does not change them, and whether the juvenile justice system acknowledges it or not; there are numerous challenges and unique issues facing the juvenile justice system, in the 21st century regarding the […]
• Changes Introduced to the Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Italy The inquisitorial system was pioneered by the Roman Catholic Church in the medieval era, where the church used this system in its religious courts for prosecution of offenders and to reform the former system which […]
• Forensic Science in the Criminal Justice System This essay is intended to explain the meaning of forensic science in the criminal justice system and to explore the evolution of methods introduced by such figures as Sir Francis Galton and Dr.
• Comparative Criminal Justice System Advantages The central values of the US criminal justice system are to protect the rights of citizens and ensure the safety of a society in which everyone is equal before the law.
• Indian Criminal Justice System Reforms In as much as some human rights activists often complain of the violation of the rights by the justice system, India’s criminal system has faced significant changes since colonial times to the present.
• Stress Among Criminal Justice Workers The criminal justice system is aware of the seriousness of the current problem and is trying to adapt to the emerging trend.
• Domestic Violence Ethical Dilemmas in Criminal Justice Various ethical issues such as the code of silence, the mental status of the offender, and limited evidence play a vital role in challenging the discretion of police officers in arresting the DV perpetrators.
• Pretrial Procedures in Criminal Justice Therefore, studying the processes that take place before the trial is important for understanding the overall delivery of criminal justice. Before the trial begins, the defense attorney and the prosecutor must prepare for it.
• Social Justice and Mental Health However, it is difficult to imagine the U.S.taking nationwide action on mental health due to the absence of healthcare for physical health, which is widely accepted as a serious issue.
• “The Quest for Peace and Justice” by Martin Luther King King states that poverty is one of the main problems for the global community, both in developing and economically developed countries.
• Punishment and Justice: The Arizona Department of Corrections When a person receives a penalty, it causes the offenders to reflect on their actions and the gravity of the crime, how it is not acceptable in society, and understand their imprisonment.
• Criminal Justice & Security: Measuring Crime Statistics NIBRS is a part of UCR; it has been in place since 1989, and its aim is to ensure the collection of detailed crime reports from law enforcement agencies.
• Positive and Negative of Evidence-Based Criminal Justice Policymaking Evidence-based practice in the criminal justice sector has concentrated on policies that deal with the administration of these sectors based on the correctional process of the incarcerated persons.
• Technical Communication Methods and Practices of Criminal Justice It also examines the use of technology in the communication process and further looks at the potential technological advancement that will be used in the communication process in the future.
• Justice in Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line Film Harris was able to convince the court that Adams was in the car with him on that night, and moreover, that he was the driver and the shooter.
• The Code of Hammurabi: The King of Justice The first step in evaluating the justice of the Code of Hammurabi is the examination of the judge’s position. As mentioned above, Hammurabi was not the first Mesopotamian king to create a set of laws […]
• Criminal Justice: Punishment and Sentencing The representatives of the general public got used to the fact that one party is to be punished, and another one is to provide punishment.
• Logical Fallacies in Criminal Justice The misrepresentation of the original argument is not taken into account, and the key objective of this fallacy is to confuse the opponent and form one’s opinion on the wrong argument.
• Justice and Inequality in Oedipus Rex and Antigone For instance, in the case of Oedipus Rex, the origin behind the tragedy can be traced to the belief of King Laius in the words of an oracle.
• Social Values: Freedom and Justice It is evident that freedom and justice are mutually exclusive, as “the theory of justice signifies its implications in regards to freedom as a key ingredient to happiness”.
• The Justice System: the Case Carroll vs. United States After the enforcement of the automobile exception in 1925, courts recognized the difference between the searches of buildings and searches of ships, automobiles and wagons which can be quickly moved from the location before the […]
• The Concept of Justice Socrates and Euthyphro show that the application of justice in different societies is not always fair. Plato’s arguments are ambiguous because they do not offer a rational basis about how religion can be used to […]
• American and Russian Justice Systems and Legislation That is why the comparison of the Russian and American justice systems could help to improve the comprehending of the way the law functions in different states.
• David Miller’s Theory of Desert in Social Justice The dependence of rewards on the variety of external and conditional factors makes the public and scholars question the idea of the desert and its use for justice.
• Financial Management in Criminal Justice Systems Criminal justice departments are touted to be one of the most inefficient and morally impaired sectors of the government. Therefore, discipline in law enforcement officers and other members of the criminal justice system is essential […]
• Juvenile Justice System in “Sleepers” Film by Barry Levinson This gang was at the disposal of these boys and they would join anytime they wanted hence the community pushed these juveniles to join the gang.
• Criminal Justice Internship Report The primary goals of the course are to expose students to new contexts and environments, broaden and deepen knowledge of key concepts and theories relevant to the field, and improve an overall learning experience.
• Jay-Z’s Contribution to Hip-Hop and Fight for Social Justice One should admit that the crime rate among black people in some poor areas is really quite high, and that is another problem Jay-Z covers in his music.
• The Feminist Theory, Prostitution, and Universal Access to Justice In the essay, it is concluded that the theory is a key component of the reforms needed in the criminal justice system with respect to prostitution. In this essay, the subject of prostitution is discussed […]
• Future of the Juvenile Justice System The juvenile justice system was established in 1899 for the purpose of providing a lenient atmosphere where juveniles could be tried.
• Criminal Justice Research: Homicide It also gains capacity with the regulations and reaction of crime from the society and the government. In homicide research, the characteristics and methods of qualitative research are evident.
• Ethics in Criminal Justice The morality of punishing people for their actions will always be a topic that is worth discussion because, in the majority of the cases, no one has the ability to view the issue from a […]
• The Cab Rank Rule and Access to Justice In light of the fact that the rule aims to support the right of every person to be eligible for representation, Fountain Court Chambers adds that the choice of a lawyer should also be respected […]
• Justice and Ideal Society in Plato’s Republic Thrasymachus argues that the moral values in the society are a complete reflection of the interests of the ruling group and not the society as a whole.
• Stereotyping Individuals in the Criminal Justice System Cultural Deviance theory is based upon two other theories, which are: Social Disorganization Theory Strain Theory Social disorganization theory focuses on the environment and places it as the main reason for crime.
• Violence and Justice in Mahabharata The intelligent man should advocate for non-violence as it is a show of one’s value for one’s life and seeing that life in the life of the others.
• Psychologist’s Roles in Criminal Justice System The purpose of this article is to outline the function of a psychologist in the criminal justice system. For example, the expert can act in a consultative or counselor capacity in the court of law.
• Religion View on Compassion and Justice The current state of the world is very insensitive to the plight of the poor and the sick because the government and the church alone have great responsibility of helping the needy.
• The Justice System: Prison Congestion The criminal justice system often fails to respond to crime in a humane and efficient manner hence in most parts of the world, prisons display elements of violation of human rights.
• Leadership Fostering Collaboration Within the Department of Juvenile Justice The role of the Department of Juvenile Justice is to use appropriate approaches that have the potential to support the needs of every child.
• Justice in “Letter to Ren An” by Sima Qian The writer was ready to forget his lowly position in the society and narrate to the court how the emperor had pure intentions.
• Stanford Prison Experiment and Criminal Justice The researchers used cameras and microphones to assess the behavior of the correctional staffs and inmates. The capability of managing the correctional facility depends on effective communication between the inmates and the prison guards.
• Social Justice and the Australian Indigenous People The main idea behind the formation of the social justice commission was to give the indigenous Australian people choice by empowering them to stand up for their rights.
• The Concept of Economic Justice The idea behind procedural justice is that, for those involved in decision-making processes, the steps taken to reach conclusions are important predictors of satisfaction independent of the impact of the results.
• Plato’s Concept of the State: The Philosophy of Justice Taking into consideration the fact that Plato was actually trying to create the image of the ideal state and show the means which in his understanding are the key issues to building up the society […]
• Aspects of Justice in Plato’s Republic Or to put it the other way around: For the moneymaking, auxiliary, and guardian classes each to do its own work in the city is the opposite.
• Socrates` Defense of Justice in the Context of a Human Being Platos book the Republic is now believed to be one of the most influential works in the history of Western philosophy and political science. This is one of the core ideas in the Republic.
• Administration of Justice: America History During these particular years, most of the traditional forms of punishment could be applied since they were the only ways of administering justice to the members of the society so that they could live upright […]
• The World Court or International Court of Justice All of the cases of the Court are submitted to the Registrar and when the Registrar receives the case, it is dated based on the date of receipt by the Registrar.
• Juvenile justice: Redeeming Our Children The established gang members, who may be in such associations because they are broke, are offered substitute sources of pay and rehabilitative measures which better their future Should the police be in the schools as […]
• Criminal Justice Systems: Saudi Arabia, Germany and the US The primary religion of the nation is Islam, which guides the cultural development of the country. The primary factor is the development of the US because the common law system was established in England.
• Criminal Justice: Investigating Problems Dependent variables: Number of racial hate crimes committed in a locality per year, the number of fatalities associated with racial hate crimes, the total population of the locality, racial disparity within the locality.
• Black Lives Matter and Social Justice Social media is a new public platform that has proved to be extremely effective in fighting against the normalization of violence against African-Americans.
• Cosa Nostra and Transnational Criminal Justice As a result of the criminal allure it exudes, the Cosa Nostra maintains connections with all of the major criminal groups, both in Italy and across the world.
• Ethical Behavior in Criminal Justice In the CJS, judges are the determinants of the sentencing and verdict of a criminal. Wilson that considers the health of the defendant and the safety of the community.
• Restoring Justice Through the French Revolution However, the role of breakthroughs, which spurred the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie with its intentions to change order within the country, led to the French Revolution, which restored justice.
• Domestic Trials and Amnesties: Peace vs. Justice The examples of Argentina, Spain, and Brazil illustrate the complex nature of amnesties and the potential consequences they may have. The pardon sparked a public outcry and led to a push for accountability and the […]
• Measures Addressing the Principle of Justice It can be concluded that the authors of the article adhered to the established ethical principles of fairness in conducting their research.
• Freedom and Social Justice Through Technology These two remarkable minds have made significant contributions to the debates on technology and how it relates to liberty and social justice.
• The Issue of Racial Justice in the Media In conclusion, this study aimed to understand the impact of media portrayals of racial justice protests on public perception and attitudes toward the movement.
• Professional vs. Personal Life Dilemma in Criminal Justice As a member of a police force, Badpenny belongs to the soldier class in Plato’s classification, making courage her virtue. Overall, Badpenny’s decision to hide her boyfriend’s identity can only be morally justified from the […]
• Virtue and Stoic Ethics in Criminal Justice The lack of ethical grounds for the behavior of criminal justice officials makes the application of the law unreliable. As an employee of a juvenile correctional colony, I will be guided by the principles of […]
• Police Culture: Criminal Justice Ethics The set of values and standards in police culture shapes the perceptions of law enforcement officers about policing and the delivery of services. Therefore, police culture is similar to other customs and habits that guides […]
• The Juvenile Justice System Evolution Process The notion of due legal process, in turn, implies the maturity and autonomy of the person involved in the due process.
• Human Rights and Justice Sector: Article Review The central problem is the complex of new African American control institutions made up of the carceral system and the ruins of the dark ghetto.
• Factors of Strategic Management of Social Justice Starting to talk about economic and technological changes that affect the sector of social justice, it is possible to observe tendencies of the level of development of the country from social policy.
• The Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program The policy reflects social control, ensuring that members of society are compliant and follow the rules to ensure community safety and sustainability.
• Technology and Learning in Criminal Justice It is a two-way avenue that includes both the student and the educator and leads to knowledge and capacity growth. A third and somewhat uncommon motivating method is the inclusion of a genuine chance for […]
• Philosophy: Justice Through Two Lenses However, the matter of justice must be perceived as an amalgamation of the two points. The only similarity of the lenses is their emphasis on the role of the government.
• Justice Through Educational Lenses However, the question arises of how significant the social contribution to the development of justice is. To maintain the political and social system, justice must be universal.
• Justice Through the Lenses of Social Science and History In both social sciences and history lenses, the human factor predominates, that is, a person acts as the main source of both injustice and justice.
• “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in Support of Contemporary Social Justice Efforts Martin Luther King Jr’s letter provides a timeless and invaluable model for contemporary social justice efforts by emphasizing the power of nonviolence, unity, and coalition building to bring about lasting change.
• Justice Through Both Lenses: Conceptions of Justice From Earliest History to Islam However, justice can be analyzed through the lenses of assumptions made by these philosophers, who share certain similarities and yet tend to be opposite in beliefs due to the extent to which the masses are […]
• Social Justice from a Philosophical Perspective Although their theories of justice were significant, they would not have existed without Plato’s influence and the contribution that their ideas of justice have made to political philosophy.
• Justice Through Social and Natural Sciences Lenses In the case of justice, the application of history, natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences lenses presents different points of view on the topic of justice and its meaning.
• Social Justice in the Modern World The main link in social relations is a measure of social justice, a derivative of the equality of people’s opportunities to realize their potential.
• John Rawls’ Theory of Justice Analysis One of the questions to ask Rawls would be whether non-social goods and ills ought to be included in the distributional profiles that establish justice judgments, as well as whether it is possible to create […]
• Restorative Justice and the Death Penalty Draft thesis: The death penalty, when viewed under the retributive justice framework and as a part of the existing justice system, is an effective deterrent and punishment measure irrespective of impractical and irrelevant restorative justice […]
• New Imaginings in Racial Justice from Perceptive of Erased African History As in Figure 2, The African Slave Trade Account portrays the attitude of the Europeans to the dehumanization of Africans in the slave trade.
• Domestic Violence: Criminal Justice In addition, the usage of illegal substances such as bhang, cocaine, and other drugs contributes to the increasing DV in society.
• Ethical Dilemma Analysis: Criminal Justice Case The publicity of the case added another layer of complexity to the decision, as either verdict would alienate a part of the population.
• Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about […]
• The Issue of Economic Justice John Rawls argued that in order to have justice there must be fairness in all levels of society. It can be achieved without resorting to socialism.
• Social Justice in Counseling Psychology The other barrier which is likely to arise in the process of integrating social justice in the workplace is legal and ethical issues.
• Social Justice and Vulnerability Theories When the country’s economic analyzers assess the status of the economy, the older people are regarded as the first group of the population that is pulling the economy backward because they are entirely dependent.
• The Climate Justice Movement The main contribution to the increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was made by the developed countries, who exchanged damage to the environment for their rapid industrial development.
• Categories of Crime in Current Justice System A stable and effective legal system work is one of the fundamental aspects necessary for the evolution of society. The severity of the crime is determined by the damage done to a person and the […]
• Social Justice in Social Work Practice The moral approach of social work is fundamentally based on the idea of social justice. Despite the numerous risks associated with advocating for social justice, criticizing injustice is one of the few courageous ways to […]
• Solving Problems of Criminal Justice For example, the theory can be applied to better understand the problem of social inequality problem described in the cited documentary.
• Juvenile Justice: The Role of Empathy He reported the incident to the police and the county attorney’s office, who got in touch with him if the offender was found; there were criminal law experts who interacted with the victim in this […]
• The Criminal Justice System Practitioner The practitioner relied on the presented professional values, worldview, and philosophy to identify, handle, and support the rights of the identified clients.
• The Criminal Justice System: Gender Diversity Among these recommendations are, for the most part, the expansion of strategies to attract more candidates and increase their interest in law enforcement recruiting.
• Journal Editors’ Role Regarding Social Justice Issues Journal editors can involve professionals from social justice forums such as civil rights lawyers in their journals as well as reduce the complexity of the presentation of social justice article contents.
• The H.O.L.L.A Healing Justice Movement Racism and sexism are the major issues faced by the youths featured in the film. The trauma led to drug abuse by the affected youths and increased hatred against other races in the U.S.
• Texas Justice System and the Cameron Todd Willingham Case The majority of states support the ability to condemn someone to death on specific occasions, while Texas is one of the states that use the death penalty the most.
• Researching the Concept of Social Justice A special kind of justice is social justice, the subjects of which are large social groups, society as a whole, and humanity.
• Contemporary Criminal Justice Issues When it comes to the dependent variable, it means the effect, and that means the reduction of infectious diseases will be the effect that the independent variable will determine.
• Negligence in the Criminal Justice System The last category of negligence is the most dangerous, and essentially stems to injury or death caused by the actions or lack thereof by the employees of the criminal justice system.
• The Youth Criminal Justice Act in Teresa Robinson’s Case 1 of the YCJA is relevant to the article since the offender’s name is still unreported despite the evidence of his involvement in the homicide.
• Ethical Obligations in Criminal Justice These criteria also include those that promote the values of honesty and compassion and the rights to life, bodily integrity, and privacy, all of which are defined as ethical standards. Empathy for others is the […]
• Advantages of Educated Criminal Justice Workforce Criminal justice agencies are an organization that administers justice, undertake prosecution, supervise the community, and conducts pretrial services. Having educated criminal justice agencies encourage a culture of learning in organizations.
• Research in Criminal Justice: Crime Solvability Factors In the sphere of criminal justice, inquiry can doubtlessly assist in the formulation of improved and more progressive laws and institutions.
• Criminal Justice in Relation to the Number of Criminals The main goal of my work is to build evidence that the number of criminals is not proportional to the severity of the crime and that despite a large number of crimes, not all of […]
• The Youth Justice Strategy Action Plan 2019–21 The Youth Justice Strategy Action Plan 2019 21 marks a crucial turning point in our effort to improve the juvenile justice system and lower the number of juvenile offenders and repeat offenders in Queensland.
• Collective Responsibility for Climate Justice Being part of the team that contributed to the formulation of the climate adaptability plan, the policy also outlines the strategies for the protection of critical infrastructure.
• The Role of Quilting in the African American Striving for Social Justice Perhaps quilting has become not only one of the symbols of African American national culture but also a way in which many black women have become visible and significant.
• Restorative Justice Aspects Analysis When considering the adult criminal court, it is not recommended to be applied in lieu of a sentence. In conclusion, restorative justice should only be applied in these circumstances: the offender is a minor, and […]
• Environmental Justice: Pollution However, the issue of environmental racism transcends national boundaries and is likely to be repeated in other regions of the world.
• “The Role of Virtual Reality in Criminal Justice Pedagogy” by Smith The journal is titled “The role of virtual reality in criminal justice pedagogy: An examination of mental illness occurring in corrections”.
• Crime Problems and Criminal Justice Notably, except for the last one, all listed procedures can be applied to crime issues discussed above and seem practical in preventing law violations.
• COVID-19 and Juvenile, Criminal Justice Legislation The measures may help to reduce overcrowding in prisons, prevent the spread of the disease, and decrease federal and state expenses on COVID-19 preventive measures and protective equipment in correctional facilities.
• Sustainable Partnerships with Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
• European Court of Justice Case Analysis
• David Lammy on Climate Change and Racial Justice
• Discretion in Decision Making in Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice Intervention in Case of Elderly
• Goals of Workers’ Justice vs Environmental Justice
• Police-Minority Relations: Criminal Justice
• Alexander & Ferzan’s Arguments on Criminal Justice
• Rawls’s Conception of Economic Justice
• Criminal Justice: Burglary, Theft, and Criminal Trespass
• Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act
• Global Issues, Climate Justice, and Human Overpopulation
• Code of Criminal Justice: False Imprisonment
• Cultural Identity and Justice in Early Learning Space
• Promoting Social Justice Through Serving God
• Social Justice and Importing Foreign Nurses Evaluation
• The Crime and Justice Impact on New Media
• Leadership in the Criminal Justice System
• The Criminal Justice Core Competency
• Criminology and Its Significance in Criminal Justice Fields
• Criminal Justice System Development
• Promoting Social Justice With Head Start Program
• Civil Justice Legal Case: Tanzin v. Tanvir
• Global Economic Justice: The Natural Law and Virtue Ethics Theories
• California’s Criminal Justice Realignment
• Environmental Impact Assessment as a Tool of Environmental Justice
• Criminal Justice System Deterring Illicit Drug Use
• Department of Justice Project on Organized Crime
• The Influence of Wealth and History of the Criminal Justice System
• Juvenile Justice in the Western World
• Criminologists’ Views on Crime and Justice Issues
• Religion, Politics, and Social Justice
• Social Justice and Its Relevance in This Century
• Social Justice Arts as a Remedy for People
• Plato’s “Republic” and the Issues of Justice
• Norwegian Versus Texan Criminal Justice Systems
• Social Justice, Diversity and Workplace Discrimination
• Social Justice: Why Do Violations Happen?
• Motivation for Juvenile Justice System
• Hypothesis Testing in Criminal Justice and Criminology
• The Modern Criminal Justice System: Discriminatory Practices
• Statistics in Criminal Justice and Criminology
• Statistics for Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Deterrence: Reflections on the Economics of Criminal Justice
• Jones Girls Juvenile Justice Facility
• Social Justice From the Biblical Point of View
• Media and Gender Stereotypes Against Females in Professional Roles Within the Criminal Justice
• Impacts of the Overlaps Between Communication and Criminal Justice for Police-Suspect Interactions
• American Justice System and Christianity
• Justice Department Seeks to Enjoin Merger Between WorldCom and Sprint Corporation
• False Confession Examples in the Justice System
• King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail on Justice
• Faith and Justice in the City. Seek for Justice
• Criminal Justice Inequality in Conflict Theory
• Restorative Environmental Justice and Its Interpretation
• Justice Research in the News
• Humanities and Justice Studies
• The Practice of Judicial Justice: The Courts
• Management of Criminal Justice Agencies
• The Federal Grand Jury in the Criminal Justice System
• Criminal Justice Agency Accountability and Liability
• Juvenile Justice System of USA
• Ethics of Elected Officials: Keeping Politics Out of Justice
• US Criminal Justice System Analysis
• Environmental Justice Movement
• Ethical Issues in Criminology and Criminal Justice Research
• Criminal Justice: The Ban-the-Box Law
• Definition of Social Justice and Social Justice in Leadership
• United States Department of Justice
• Employment Practices of the United States Department of Justice
• Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice
• Environmental Worldviews & Environmental Justice
• Criminal Justice Career
• Tort of Negligence Law and Balance of Justice
• The Effects of the Criminal Justice System
• Plato’s Justice and Injustice Theory
• Euthyphro: Plato’s Notion of Justice in Stratified Societies
• Community Engagement and Social Justice Promotion
• Punishment and Restitution: Models of Justice
• Criminal Justice System: Child Abuse
• Criminal Justice Standards for the Defense Function
• Liberty Upsets Patterns: Justice Approach
• Medical Anthropology: Teammates in the Support of Justice, Diversity, and Inclusion
• John Rawles’ Principles of Justice
• Social Justice Leadership and Supervision
• Rawls’ Theory of Justice and the Veil of Ignorance
• The Food Justice Social Movement
• Ethics of Justice: Making the Right Decision
• Criminal Justice & Criminology Research Methods
• Restorative Justice for Juveniles: Ethical Guidelines
• Uganda’s Economic Planning and Social Justice
• Ideal Theory as a Practical Component of Global Justice Theory
• Theories of Justice: Rawls Attitude
• Special Corrections Issues in the Justice System
• Rise of Mental Social Justice
• Social Justice in the US Healthcare System
• Conceptualizing Supervision in Search of Social Justice
• The Expanding Role of the Prosecutor in Juvenile Justice
• Building a Career in Criminal Justice
• The Impact of Performance Appraisals on Job Satisfaction of Criminal Justice Personnel
• Meta-Analysis of the Ethics of Risk Assessment and Risk Management in Juvenile Justice
• Risk Assessment and Risk Management in Juvenile Justice
• The Pitfalls of Criminal Justice Budget Cuts: An Administrator’s Perspective
• Future of the Juvenile Justice System
• Juvenile Justice Process and Corrections: The Case of Colleen M.
• Researching HIV, AIDS and Social Justice
• Policing Duties: Criminal Justice
• Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and Consumer Contracts
• Justice Miscarriages Negative Impacts on Individuals and Society
• Equal Pay Convention Ratified by New Zealand and Ensuring Social Justice
• Communication Within the Criminal Justice System: Probation Organisation
• Criminal Justice: Racial Prejudice and Racial Discrimination
• Criminal Justice Ethics: Kant’s and Bentham’s Views
• “Ethics in Criminal Justice: In Search of the Truth” by Souryal
• To Make Things Right: Restorative Justice Process
• New Technology & Criminal Justice
• Significant Issues in Criminal Justice
• Criminology: Modern Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice Professionals: What They Should Know
• The Origins of the Criminal Justice System in America
• Historical Justice Policy Comparison
• Neuroscience and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice: Prosecution & Judicial Proceedings
• Criminal Justice: Cases of Offenders in Trafficking
• The Juvenile Justice System: Corrected Perpetrators
• Essentials of Criminal Justice
• Report Writing for Criminal Justice Professionals
• Criminal Justice Ethics of Traffic Police Officers
• Ethical Observations of Criminal Justice System
• Juvenile Justice and Defence Attorney’s Role
• Criminal Justice Ethics: Ethical Observations
• Criminal Justice Policies and Theories
• Response Paper on Book “Criminal Justice Management”
• Bribery as a Critical Criminal Justice Violation
• An Ethical System in Criminal Justice
• Need for Policy Reform in the Criminal Justice System
• Inclusion in the Justice System of Elements of Correction
• Criminal Law: Reforms in the Judicial Justice
• Criminal Law: Media and Its Influence on Criminal Justice Policy
• Public Opinion and Criminal Justice Policy
• Jury System in Different Criminal Justice Contexts
• An Application of the Criminal Justice System
• Influence of Socioeconomic Status and Social Justice on Health in the US
• Criminal Justice: Over Institutional Organization
• Learning Theory Implications on Criminal Justice Practices
• Criminal Justice Workplace Observation
• Deterrence in Criminal Justice Practices
• Administration of Criminal Justice – Elements of Planned Change Administrators
• Police, Justice and Law: Knights in Shining Armor
• Research Process and Terminology: Criminal Justice
• Between the Social and the Medical Justice
• Suicide in People With a Criminal Justice History
• Criminal Justice System: “Lucky” by Alice Sebold
• Key Elements of Criminal Justice System
• Achieving Real Justice: Funding Criminal Justice Reform
• The Criminal Justice System in the US
• Ethics Behind Technology Implementation in Justice System
• Impact of Diversity on Criminal Justice
• Ethical Issues in Criminal Justice
• A Criminal Justice Approach to Suppressing Terrorism
• Web Research in Criminal Justice
• Expected Changes in the Criminal Justice Field Over the Next 50 Years
• Juvenile Justice Systems and Processes
• Cultural and Racial Prejudices in the Criminal Justice System
• Criminal Justice Leadership: Strategies and Practice
• Court Decisions that Influence Juvenile Justice System
• Modern Juvenile Justice Program
• Restorative Justice Program
• Can Writing Really Do Justice to the Experience of Violence?
• Youth Justice Conferencing as a Government Hybrid Technique
• Leadership Issue in the Criminal Justice Field
• Procedures in the Justice System in Maryland
• Social Justice Perspective
• Hacking Government Website From the View of Right and Justice
• Criminology: Bring Community Justice To Corrections
• Rape and Its Justice Literature Reference
• Global Justice and Africa in the Contemporary World
• The Concept of Justice Reinvestment
• Organizational Justice and Its Three Components
• The Justice Manifesto: The Environmental Security
• Communication Databases and Criminal Justice System
• Mapping Environmental Justice: Water and Waste Management
• Guilt and Justice in Lord Byron’s Manfred
• Violence, Gender and Justice Review
• Deaf Youth: Social Justice Through Media and Activism
• Remedies, Legal Way of Getting Justice for Criminals
• Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
• Philosophical Theory of Law and Justice and Problem of Crime and Justice
• Law. Women and the Justice System
• Justice and Ethical Responsibility in Society
• Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Methodologies: The Problems of Use in Justice
• Girls and the Juvenile Justice System
• Judgment and Social Interaction in “The Lady Justice”
• How the Lady Justice Has Defeated a Silver Chinese Dragon
• The Definition of Universal Justice
• Restorative Justice: Justice Programs for Inmates, Parolees
• Justice in America: Constitution, Laws and Reality
• Providing Justice for Victims, Offenders and Community
• Lynching History of African Americans: An Absurd Illegal Justice System in the 19th Century
• The Philosophy of Justice and Its Complete Analysis
• Order, Freedom, Equality, & Justice
• Justice and the Concept of Global Citizenship
• Reconciliation, Justice and Trauma-Healing
• Natural Law & Justice and Good Governance
• Relevance of Gender to Global Justice: Gender, Sexuality, Nationality and Cultural Variations in Concepts of Justice
• Justice in Society in the Movie “The Ox-Bow Incident”
• Uniform Code of Military Justice
• “The Republic”: Socrates Defense of Justice
• The Criminal Justice Ethics Principles
• Re-Examining Criminal and Social Justice Systems: Reducing Incarceration Rates in the US
• The Problem of Justice Highlighted in American Literature
• Problem Analysis in the Criminal Justice System
• Criminal Justice for Physically Injured Crime Victims
• Criminal Justice: Term Definition
• Justice and Society: Meritocracy
• Criminal Justice: Recidivism and Corrections
• Young Murders and Juvenile Justice in Canada
• Justice in America Based on Famous Speeches
• Risk Management in Justice and Security Organizations
• Washington County Court Services
• The Theory of Justice Need a Theory of Citizenship
• Effects of Technology in Criminal Justice Systems
• Research Methods in Criminal Justice and Criminology
• The Best Principle in Distributive Justice
• Social Justice and Ethics: Beneficiaries of U.S. Welfare Programs
• Justice as Guarantee Fairness in the Society
• Role and Composition of the European Count of Justice
• European Union & Court of Justice
• Criminal Justice Correction Professions and Careers
• Criminal Justice: Race, Age, and Gender Factors
• Principles of Justice: Serial Killers and Rapers
• Social Justice and Feminism in America
• Equality of Opportunity and Social Justice: Affirmative Action
• Juvenile Justice in America
• Criminal Justice Agency Organizational Behavior
• Justice in America: “It Is Not Fair”
• Wrongful Capital Convictions in Criminal Justice
• The Coordination and Sharing of Information Between Government, Justice Agencies and Others
• Money and Justice: High-Profile Cases
• The Management of Organizational Justice by Cropanzana et al.
• Justice of Execution of R. Ludman & King Louis XVI
• The Concept of “Justice” in All Its Manifestations
• Structured Inequality in Justice System
• Truth and Justice in “Anil’s Ghost” by Michael Ondaatje
• The Problem of Justice and Law in American Literature
• Contemporary Criminal Justice Leadership
• Theory of Justice According to Plato
• Christianity Religion and Asian World: Social Justice
• Juvenile Justice System vs. Adult Prosecution
• Crime, Justice and the Media Relations
• The Ministry of Justice of the UAE: Creativity and Innovation
• The Vision in “Blind” Justice Theory Analysis
• US Department of Justice: Drug Courts
• Relationship Between the Supreme Court and the High Court Justice
• Crime of Genocide: Justice and Ethical Issues
• Justice and Injustice in Medea’s and Socrates’ View
• Correctional Education: An Incomprehensible View on Justice?
• Criminal Justice as an Open System
• Determination of Professionalism in Criminal Justice Organizations
• Social Justice for Indigenous Women in Canada
• Juvenile Justice System: Correction and Sentencing
• In the Pursuit of Justice: Dale and Mike Parak’s Case
• Appiah’s Ideas of Racism, Equality, and Justice
• The State of American Juvenile Justice
• Justice in Islamic and Western Societies
• Kafka’s “The Trial” Compared to the Justice System
• Justice for the Mentally Ill
• House Arrest in Juvenile Justice
• Environmental Justice in Different Communities
• Social Justice and Educational Reform in the US
• Justice Administration and Ethical Considerations
• Racism Effects on Criminal Justice System
• Ethical Criteria in Decision-Making: Utilitarian, Justice, Rights
• The United States Juvenile Justice System
• Applied Research in Criminal Justice Profession
• Conventional Food System: Justice and Security
• Politics and Justice Challenges in American Society
• Ethical Conduct in Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice Policy Development and Implementation
• Social Justice in Quality Health Care
• Community Psychology: Social Change and Justice
• Americans With Disabilities in Criminal Justice Agencies
• Diversity Training for Criminal Justice Employees
• Criminal Justice Employees’ Rights and Laws
• Organizational Justice: Identical Treatment for All Employees
• Empathy, Equality and Justice as Reflective Values
• What Is Social Justice?
• Public Shaming and Justice
• Administration of Criminal Justice Agencies
• Policy and Criminal Justice
• Military Justice Issues: People’s Rights and Freedoms
• Social Justice: Philosophy of Employment
• Justice: A Natural Law or a Social Construction?
• The Relation Between Poverty and Justice
• Regional and International Justice Mechanisms
• Organizational Justice Theory and Its Application
• Criminal Justice Administration and Police Functions
• Crime and Criminal Justice News
• Women in Legal and Criminal Justice Occupations
• Cancer Alley: Environmental Justice Analysis
• Women Working in the Criminal Justice System
• “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection” by Henry Shue
• Criminal Justice System and Inequilty in America
• American Women’s Movements for Social Justice
• Justice and Conflict & Cooperation and Competition
• Juvenile Justice and Punishment in Public Opinion
• Restorative Justice in the Criminal Justice Process
• Social Justice Group Work for Homeless Young Mothers
• Gang Violence: Criminal Justice Research
• US Juvenile Justice System’s Issues and Imperfections
• Research Inquiry Methods in Criminal Justice Project
• Criminal Justice: Balancing in Philosophy and Practice
• Juvenile Justice Agencies, Their Challenges and Solutions
• Racial Disparities in American Justice System
• Ethics in Criminal Justice and Fuller’s Principle
• Women and Minorities Recruits in Criminal Justice
• Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: An Anthology
• Health Care Services: Social Justice Analysis
• Criminal Justice Careers in the Modern Society
• Criminal Justice Process in the US
• Military Trials: The Criminal Justice Procedures Violations
• Modern Justice System Peculiarities
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8 Tips For Writing A Social Justice Essay

Social justice covers a variety of issues involving race, gender, age, sexual orientation, income equality and much more. How do you write an essay on a social justice issue that’s engaging, informative and memorable? Here are eight tips you should take to heart when writing:

When writing a social justice essay, you should brainstorm for ideas, sharpen your focus, identify your purpose, find a story, use a variety of sources, define your terms, provide specific evidence and acknowledge opposing views.

#1. Brainstorm creatively

Before you start writing your social justice essay, you need a topic. Don’t hesitate to look far and wide for inspiration. Read other social justice essays, look at recent news stories, watch movies and talk to people who are also interested in social justice. At this stage, don’t worry about the “trendiness” of your idea or whether a lot of people are already writing about it. Your topic will evolve in response to your research and the arguments you develop. At the brainstorming stage, you’re focused on generating as many ideas as possible, thinking outside the box and identifying what interests you the most. Take a free online course to get a better understanding of social justice.

You can take a creative brainstorming approach! A blog on Hubspot offers 15 creative ideas such as storyboarding, which involves laying out ideas in a narrative form with terms, images and other elements. You can also try freewriting, which is when you choose something you’re interested in. Next, write down everything you already know, what you need to know but don’t already, why the topic matters and anything else that comes to mind. Freewriting is a good exercise because it helps you decide if there’s any substance to a topic or if it’s clear there’s not enough material for a full essay.

#2. Sharpen your topic’s focus

The best essays narrow on a specific social justice topic and sharpen its focus, so it says something meaningful and interesting. This is often challenging, but wrestling with what exactly you want your essay to say is worth the effort. Why? An essay with a narrow, sharp focus has a clearer message. You’re also able to dig deeper into your topic and provide better analysis. If your topic is too broad, you’re forced to skim the surface, which produces a less interesting essay.

How do you sharpen your essay’s focus? Grace Fleming provides several tips on ThoughtCatalog . First, you can tell your topic is too broad if it can be summarized in just 1-2 words. As an example, “health inequity” is way too broad. Fleming suggests applying the questions, “Who, what, where, when, why and how,” to your topic to narrow it down. So, instead of just “health inequity,” you might end up with something like “The impact of health inequity in maternal healthcare systems on Indigenous women.” Your topic’s focus may shift or narrow even further depending on the research you find.

Writing a human rights topic research paper? Here are five of the most useful tips .

#3. Identify your purpose

As you unearth your topic and narrow its focus, it’s important to think about what you want your essay to accomplish. If you’re only thinking about your essay as an assignment, you’ll most likely end up with a product that’s unfocused or unclear. Vague sentiments like “Everyone is writing about social justice” and “Social justice is important” are also not going to produce an essay with a clear purpose. Why are you writing this essay? Are you wanting to raise awareness of a topic that’s been historically ignored? Or do you want to inspire people to take action and change something by giving them concrete how-to strategies? Identifying your purpose as soon as possible directs your research, your essay structure and how you style your writing.

If you’re not sure how to find your purpose, think about who you’re writing for. An essay written for a university class has a different audience than an essay written for a social justice organization’s social media page. If there are specific instructions for your essay (professors often have requirements they’re looking for), always follow them closely. Once you’ve identified your purpose, keep it at the front of your mind. You’ll produce an essay that’s clear, focused and effective.

#4. Find a human story

The best social justice essays don’t only provide compelling arguments and accurate statistics; they show your topic’s real-world impact. Harvard’s Kennedy School’s communications program describes this process as “finding a character.” It’s especially useful when you’re writing something persuasive. Whatever your topic, try to find the human stories behind the ideas and the data. How you do that depends on the nature of your essay. As an example, if you’re writing something more academic, focusing too much on the emotional side of a story may not be appropriate. However, if you’re writing an essay for an NGO’s fundraising campaign, focusing on a few people’s stories helps your reader connect to the topic more deeply.

How do you choose what stories to feature? Harvard suggests choosing someone you have access to either through your research or as an interview subject. If you get the opportunity to interview people, make sure you ask interesting questions that dig beneath the surface. Your subject has a unique perspective; you want to find the information and stories only they can provide.

#5. Rely on a variety of sources

Depending on your essay’s purpose and audience, there might be certain sources you’re required to use. In a piece for Inside Higher Ed, Stephanie Y. Evans describes how her students must use at least 10 source types in their final paper assignment. Most of the time, you’ll have a lot of freedom when it comes to research and choosing your sources. For best results, you want to use a wide variety. There are a few reasons why. The first is that a variety of sources gives you more material for your essay. You’ll access different perspectives you wouldn’t have found if you stuck to just a few books or papers. Reading more sources also helps you ensure your information is accurate; you’re fact-checking sources against one another. Expanding your research helps you address bias, as well. If you rely only on sources that reflect your existing views, your essay will be much less interesting.

While we’re talking about sources, let’s touch on citations. If you’re writing an essay for school, your teacher will most likely tell you what citation method they want you to use. There are several depending on the discipline. As an example, in the United States, social science disciplines like sociology and education tend to use the American Psychological Association (APA) style. Some places are very rigid about citation styles, while others are more relaxed. If you’re writing an essay where your citation won’t be checked, you still need to give credit to any ideas, thoughts, or research that’s not yours. Proper citation builds trust with your reader and boosts your credibility.

Here are more tips on writing a human rights essay!

#6. Define your key terms

To make your essay as clear and effective as possible, you want every reader on the same page right at the beginning. Defining your key terms is an important step. As Ian Johnston writes, creating an effective argument requires “the establishment of clear, precise, and effective definitions for key terms in the arguments.” You may have to adapt an existing definition or write your own. Johnston offers principles such as adjusting a definition based on the knowledge of who you’re writing for, focusing on what a term is and not just on its effects, and expanding a definition so it covers everything a reader needs to know.

How do you decide which terms are important in your essay? First, never assume a reader understands a term because it’s “obvious.” The most obvious terms are often the ones that need the clearest definitions. If your reader doesn’t know exactly what you’re talking about when you use a term like “health equity,” your essay won’t be as effective. In general, you want to define any terms relevant to your topic, terms that are used frequently and terms with distinct meanings in the context of your essay.

#7. Provide specific evidence and examples

Social justice issues are grounded in reality, so an essay should reflect that. Don’t spend your whole paper being philosophical or hypothetical. As an example, let’s say you’re writing an essay about desertification in Mali. Don’t discuss desertification as an abstract concept. Include real statistics and case studies on desertification in Mali, who it’s affecting the most and what is being done about it. For every argument you make, present supporting evidence and examples.

The strength of your evidence determines the strength of your arguments. How do you find strong evidence? Cite This For Me lists a handful of examples , such as studies, statistics, quotes from subject matter experts and/or reports, and case studies. Good evidence also needs to be accurate and in support of your argument. Depending on your essay topic, how current a piece of evidence is also matters. If you’re not relying on the most current evidence available, it can weaken your overall argument. Evidence should also be as specific as possible to your topic. Referring back to our desertification in Mali essay, that means locating examples of how desertification affects people in Mali , not in Chad or Russia.

Academic essay writing requires specific skills. Here’s an online introductory course on academic writing .

#8. Acknowledge your critics

Not every social justice essay requires an acknowledgment of opposing viewpoints, but addressing critics can strengthen your essay. How? It lets you confront your critics head-on and refute their arguments. It also shows you’ve researched your topic from every angle and you’re willing to be open-minded. Some people worry that introducing counterarguments will weaken the essay, but when you do the work to truly dissect your critic’s views and reaffirm your own, it makes your essay stronger.

The University of Pittsburgh offers a four-step strategy for refuting an argument. First, you need to identify the claim you’re responding to. This is often the trickiest part. Some writers misrepresent the claims of their critics to make them easier to refute, but that’s an intellectually dishonest method. Do your best to understand what exactly the opposing argument is claiming. Next, make your claim. You might need to provide specific evidence, which you may or may not have already included in your essay. Depending on the claim, your own thoughts may be a strong enough argument. Lastly, summarize what your claim implies about your critics, so your reader is left with a clear understanding of why your argument is the stronger one.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

What does justice mean to you?

When students recited it in the schools, I often wondered if they had any understanding of the words so dutifully proclaimed every morning. Sometimes, I question adults' take on this statement that starts so many meetings and public events. There is one key term enshrined in this promise of loyalty to our country.

It's the Pledge of Allegiance, and the word in question is justice.

How do you define justice? Many would say that it means fairness. Laws should be applied fairly to all people. That's why the statue of Justice at the Supreme Court is blind. She sees no gender, class, color, infirmity or age when subjecting citizens to the laws of the land.

Others would say that justice means "he got what was coming to him." The severity of the punishment should match the severity of the crime for justice to be done.

Or, after seeing a movie you might say, "It was OK, but it really didn't do justice to the book." Here the word implies that the movie did not reflect the content of the novel to its full advantage.

What about the criminal justice system? Now we're referring to the process of arresting, trying and sentencing people who have broken the law.

How about Jean Valjean stealing the loaf of bread in "Les Miserables"? He did this for a just reason; he did this with justice. The good result he sought justified the means used to get it.

Then there are positions like justices of the peace all the way up to the justices on the Supreme Court.

But recently I read John Dominic Crossan's latest book about balancing the seemingly conflicting views of a vengeful God and a compassionate God in scripture, and re-read Mortimer Adlers's book "Six Great Ideas." Both expressed ideas about justice that weren't quite like any I usually hear about.

Crossan calls justice in its highest form "distributive justice." It's the fair and equitable distribution of the "good things" of this world … what all people need to live a good human life. Not only do they need it, they are entitled to it, says Crossan. All people are born with a natural right to have a share in "the bounties of God's world."

Adler calls justice the "supreme good" and says that it's all about people being able to have whatever they need to get through their lives successfully. What he does not say is that these things must be possessed by everyone equally. Everyone cannot and should not get exactly the same amount of society's resources. He's not using Mao's Little Red Book for his game plan.

There always has been, and will be, unequal distributions of wealth. But everyone should be a "have" to some degree as opposed to a "have not."

Peoples' skills, intelligence, ambitions and values differ. So what they manage to get from society will differ, too. But for a just society, there has to be a baseline. No person should have less than is needed to get through his or her life with some level of dignity, and no person should have so much that it leaves the first group without the security of knowing that they can make it.

Now, if you accept this view of justice, let me ask, "Do we live in a just society? Do we have justice for all?" Answer Yes or No to the following questions.

Does what we pay for the education and retraining of displaced workers exceed what is spent on the continual upgrading of our military might? Does the pay for low-wage earners rise proportionately with the burgeoning wealth of the top 1 percent?

Do the costs of infrastructure improvements at home rise above the expenses incurred by supporting foreign governments that are more beholden to the U.S. than its own citizens? Is the money spent on child care and health maintenance for our poorest citizens a match for the subsidies and tax breaks given to our largest corporations?

If you answered "Yes" to everything, we're doing great. If you did not, I'd suggest that you — we — ask ourselves if the pledge's description is right. "… with liberty and justice for all"?

Jeff Zdrale is a Neenah resident. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Justice — What Is the True Definition of Justice?

What is The True Definition of Justice?

• Categories: Canada Justice

About this sample

Words: 332 |

Published: Aug 16, 2019

Words: 332 | Page: 1 | 2 min read

Works Cited

• Hurlbert, J. S. (2011). Pursuing justice: An introduction to justice studies. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
• Hurlbert, J. S., & Mulvale, J. P. (2011). The meanings of justice: An introduction. In Pursuing justice: An introduction to justice studies (pp. 1-18). Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
• Levin, B., & Lavy, E. (2018). Sentencing reform is critical for youth in the justice system. The Hill Times. https://www.hilltimes.com/2018/05/28/sentencing-reform-critical-youth-justice-system/143165
• Heritage Canada. (2017). The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-rights-protected/charter.html
• Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice: A defense of pluralism and equality. Basic Books.
• Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press.
• Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge University Press.
• Goodin, R. E. (1980). Utilitarianism as a public philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
• Freeman, M. (2011). Distributive justice. John Wiley & Sons.

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Essay on Justice

Every living thing has life. But the lives of humans are much different and advance as compared to other living things. However, the lives of humans are not that easy. The main thing that makes human life easy and peaceful is Justice. Justice is essential for maintaining a fair and equitable society and is an important part of human life.

On an individual level, justice ensures that everyone is treated fairly and has access to the same rights and privileges. To understand the necessity of justice, let us have a look at justice in detail.

Short and Long Justice Essay in English

Here, we are presenting long and short essays on Justice in English for students under word limits of 100 – 150 Words, 200 – 250 words, and 500 – 600 words. This topic is useful for students of classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 in English. Also it will be helpful for students preparing for various competitive exams. These provided essays will help you to write effective essays, paragraphs, and speeches on Justice.

Justice Essay 10 Lines (100 – 120 Words)

1) Justice is a concept of fairness.

2) It ensures that people are treated equally.

3) Justice is considered to be the foundation of a secular society.

4) It is a fundamental right of every individual.

5) It is a complex concept that can often require difficult decisions.

6) Justice is an important part of a democratic country.

7) Justice should be encouraged in all areas of life.

8) It is a balance between rights and obligations.

9) Justice should work to resolve conflicts peacefully.

10) Justice should ensure that all people have access to equal opportunities.

Short Essay on Justice (250 – 300 Words)

Introduction

Justice is a concept of fairness that must be based on ethics, rationality, law, religion, and equality. It is a concept that upholds the equality of all people and treats everyone fairly.

Justice is not only an idea but an action that requires understanding the right and wrong of decisions to make sure everyone is treated fairly.

Advantages of Justice

Justice is essential for a healthy and functioning society. It is the foundation of democracy and laws. It is also essential for safeguarding individual rights and freedoms. It ensures that individuals are treated fairly and with respect, and that everyone has access to the same rights and privileges. People are afraid to commit crimes in a country where the law is followed. Additionally, justice offers voice to the weak and the impoverished, preventing the wealthy and powerful from taking advantage of them.

Disadvantages of Justice

One of the main disadvantages of justice is that it can be slow and inefficient. Additionally, with legal costs and court fees, people have to pay huge amount. Moreover, justice systems have been known to be biased against certain groups especially the powerful peoples, leading to unequal outcomes. Many people are afraid of the process of justice systems and end up losing their hope.

Justice is an essential element of a healthy society and is fundamental to the maintenance of a peaceful world. Justice should be applied equally to all people, regardless of their race, gender, or social class. Every citizen should follow law and promote equality to enjoy a healthy living.

Long Essay on Justice (500 Words)

“Justice” is not only a small word, it is a sentiment. For many people justice is not only their fundamental right but it is their need. It’s challenging to define what justice means. It has broad meaning varying from person to person. Justice should be seen as both a reward for doing good deeds and a means of punishing bad behavior.

What Is Justice?

Justice is the concept of treating all people with respect, regardless of social or economic status. When justice is applied, it ensures that individuals receive fair treatment and that their rights are protected. This includes access to resources and opportunities, as well as the right to a fair trial and equal protection under the law.

Types of Justice

There are three types of justice: retributive justice, restorative justice, and distributive justice. Retributive justice is the idea that those who commit wrongs should be punished as a way of getting revenge. While restorative justice is focused on repairing the harm caused by wrongdoing and restoring relationships between offenders and victims. Distributive justice is concerned with ensuring that resources are shared equally.

Importance of Justice

Justice is important for a number of reasons. It helps to maintain order in society and to ensure that laws are followed. Justice also helps to protect the rights of individuals and to ensure that people are treated same. It also helps to promote respect for the law and to create a sense of trust between citizens and the government. Justice is a cornerstone of democracy and is essential to the preservation of social order. Justice is an essential element of a healthy society.

The Black Side of Justice

Justice is an important part of society, but it has some disadvantages as well. Justice can be slow and expensive, as it often takes a long time for justice to be served. People may have to wait a long time for their case to go through the court system, and they may have to pay a lot of money for lawyers or court fees. Additionally, justice can be subjective, as judges and juries may interpret the law differently and come to different conclusions. This can lead to unfair results, which can be very frustrating and disappointing for involved.

How Justice can be maintained in society?

There are many ways through which justice can be maintained in a society. Some of them are listed below:

1. All citizens should follow by the laws, regardless of their social or economic status.

2. No one should be given special privileges or be discriminated on the basis of their race, gender, religion, or any other characteristic.

3. Everyone has basic human rights that should be respected by others.

4. People should be held accountable for their actions and any wrongdoings should be punished accordingly.

5. Governments and other institutions should be transparent about their decisions and actions.

Justice is an essential concept in a functioning society. It is a fundamental human right that should be respected and upheld by all nations. We must work together to create a fairer and more equal society.

I hope the above-provided essay on Justice will be helpful to you in understanding the advantages, disadvantages, and role of Justice in our society.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions on Justice

Ans. India celebrated 20 February every year as World Day of Social Justice.

Ans. Lady Justice is generally represented holding a set of scales in one hand, on which she balances the act and its effects in order to reach equilibrium and, thus, justice.

Ans. The justice system works by having two sides present their case to a judge or jury. Based on the evidence, the judge then makes a fair decision.

Ans. The role of the police in the justice system is to investigate crimes, gather evidence, and arrest the criminal.

Ans. As justice is impartial and shouldn’t be dependent on a person’s appearance or other external factors, the statue of justice is blindfolded.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, writing the stanford 'what is meaningful to you' essay.

Hey guys, I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to approach the 'What is meaningful to you and why?' essay for Stanford. Any ideas or examples to get me started and help me think about what I should write about?

Hi there! Overcoming writer's block can be tough, especially when you're trying to express something meaningful in a college essay. Remember to keep it personal and authentic, as that's what the admissions officers are looking for. Let me provide a few tips and prompts to help you brainstorm.

1. Consider your values: Reflect on the core values that have shaped you and your actions. What's important to you, and why? This could be anything from family and community to intellectual curiosity or social justice. Describe any experiences, events, or people that have helped you develop these values.

2. Focus on a specific anecdote: Instead of writing about a general theme or value, you can hone in on a specific story or incident that conveys meaning in your life. The idea is to showcase a moment that you've learned from or that has played a pivotal role in your personal growth. Make sure the anecdote highlights your personality and demonstrates why the topic is meaningful to you.

3. Reflect on personal growth: Think about times in your life when you've faced challenges or setbacks and how you've grown from those experiences. Describe the process of overcoming obstacles and how it has shaped you as a person. Be candid and introspective while showing the significance of the experience.

4. Showcase your passions or hobbies: Share what you genuinely love doing outside of school or work. How does this activity connect to your personal values or aspirations? Tell a story that illustrates your dedication and enthusiasm for your passion.

For instance, imagine that you've always been a strong advocate for the environment and have been involved in various initiatives towards protecting it. You could write about one of the projects or campaigns that you spearheaded, focusing on the emotions you felt, the challenges you faced, and the impact you made. Show your dedication and explain why it's important for you to contribute to a greener world.

To learn more about Stanford's prompts, read this blog post: https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-stanford-university-essays/

Remember, the key is to be genuine, personal, and engaging. Try to stay away from clichés or generic statements, and focus on what truly makes the topic meaningful to you. Good luck!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

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What does justice mean to you essay

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• 18 Sep, 2015

Justice means having someone adjudicated and found guilty for a crime they have committed. Laws are put in place for a reason and everyone should have to abide by them. Just having a criminal off the street is enough justice for me, but locking one up and “throwing away the key” will not make them better; it will probably not change them at all and.

Date VISIT Servant-Leadership, Forgiveness, and Social Justice. September 16,2015 and Social Justice. SHANN R. FERCH. lives of quiet. 1. Ferch essay 5/03 4/19/ 03 9:29 AM Page 1. and productivity, and maintain a healthy sense of hope and meaning in. “Thank you, my lord,” the three hermits replied, and the bishop pro -. ly does so through.

Justice is a concept that involves people getting what they have coming to them. In a sense, the good reap rewards, the bad reap punishment. This essay will examine justice in its many forms and explain the benefits and shortcomings of each form. Justice can be broken into three major categories: social, personal, and supernatural. Social justice.

What Justice Means to Me Lavee Jackson Course: CJUS141-1302A-05 Introduction to Criminal Justice Subject: Phase 1 DB 2 – Historical Perspective April 13, 2013 When I think of the question What is Justice to me many things come to my mind. I have so many things scrambling in my mind and I just. What Justice Means to Me Justice can be defined many.

I m writing a descriptive essay on the word Justice. I would like to know what it means to all of you. Thank you for your in put. I m writing a descriptive essay on the word Justice. I would like to know what it means to all of you. Thank you for your in.

 Law Enforcement in a Just Society Ashlee Wegner Introduction to Criminal Justice Curtis Turney 19 January 2015 The United States of America was founded on the basis of freedom. Freedom, though implied through our very citizenship, is not something we have the ability to take for. What Justice Means to Me will describe personal views on what.

JUSTICE WHAT JUSTICE MEANS TO ME? I’ll start by defining the “justice.” Justice is a noun meaning the quality of conforming to principles of reason, to generally accepted standards of right and wrong, and to the stated terms of laws, rules, agreements, etc., rightfulness or lawfulness, as of a claim, the administering of deserved punishment or.

What does Justice mean to me? What exactly does Justice *****, and how does it apply to a criminal justice professional? Justice as such refers to a sense of fairness ***** impartiality, an evenhandedness, righteousness, and also objectivity and independence in making up one s opinions. ***** is the concept which must predominate when laws are.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay. Do what you love doesn t mean, do what you would like to do most. Aug 14, 2011 · What Happened to Obama? DREW. arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should. history does not bend toward justice through. HOME Library Civil War Era Frederick.

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Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court Majority: You’re Doing It Wrong

By Louis Menand

One day in 1993, Stephen Breyer , then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which sits in Boston, was riding his bicycle in Harvard Square when he was hit by a car. He was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. While he was recovering, he was visited by three White House officials. They had flown up to interview him for a possible nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

The vetting went well enough, and Breyer was invited to Washington to meet the President, Bill Clinton . Breyer’s doctors advised against flying, so he took the train, in some discomfort. The meeting with Clinton did not go well. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s “ The Nine ,” a book about the Supreme Court, Clinton found Breyer “heartless.” “I don’t see enough humanity,” he complained. “I want a judge with soul.” Breyer was told to go home. They would call.

He knew that things had gone poorly. “There’s only two people who aren’t convinced I’m going to be on the Supreme Court,” he told a fellow-judge. “One is me and the other is Clinton.” He was right. The phone never rang. The seat went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg .

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Ginsburg was a cool customer, too, but she knew which buttons to push. In her interview with Clinton, she talked about the death of her mother and about helping her husband get through law school after he was stricken with testicular cancer. Clinton loved catch-in-the-throat stories like that. Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate 96–3.

A year went by, there was another Supreme Court vacancy, and Breyer was again in the mix. His candidacy was pushed by Ted Kennedy, with whom he had worked as the chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Kennedy was its chair. Clinton really wanted to nominate his Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, but Babbitt faced opposition from senators in Western states, and Breyer seemed politically hypoallergenic.

So Breyer was chosen. Still, the White House did not do him any favors. Clinton’s indecisiveness was an ongoing story in the press—it had taken him eighty-six days to pick Ginsburg—and the news coverage made it plain that Breyer was not his first or even his second choice. The White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, told reporters that, of the candidates being considered, Breyer was “the one with the fewest problems.”

Clinton announced the selection without even waiting for Breyer to come down from Boston. When Breyer did show up, a few days later, he said, “I’m glad I didn’t bring my bicycle down.” Famous last words. In 2011, he broke his collarbone in another biking accident near his home in Cambridge, and in 2013 he fractured his right shoulder and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery after crashing his bicycle near the Korean War Veterans Memorial, on the National Mall. He was seventy-four. You have to give him credit. He gets right back on the horse.

Since his appointment to the Court, Breyer has published several books on his jurisprudential views. His latest is “ Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism ” (Simon & Schuster). It sums up his frustration with the court that he just stepped down from.

Clinton was not the only person who read Breyer as a technocrat. People felt he lacked a quality that Clinton could apparently summon at will—empathy. “He’s always been smarter than most of those around him,” the Yale constitutional-law professor Akhil Amar explained to a reporter, “so he’s had to learn how to get along with other people.”

That was his reputation at Harvard Law School, too, where he taught administrative law for many years before becoming a judge. “Breyer’s basic social instincts are conservative,” a Harvard colleague, Morton Horwitz, told the Times . “His legal culture is more liberal, and his very flexible pragmatism will enable him to give things a gentle spin in a liberal direction. But he’s a person without deep roots of any kind. He won’t develop a vision. . . . The words ‘social justice’ would somewhat embarrass him.”

It’s true that Breyer has a professorial presentation. He is cosmopolitan and erudite. He travels to other countries and is interested in their legal systems; reporters like to drop the fact that he has read “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” in French, twice. He is also, for a judge, relatively wealthy. His wife, Joanna Hare, a clinical psychologist at Dana-Farber, is the daughter of an English viscount.

Before joining the Court, Breyer showed few signs of being a social-justice warrior. He has, like the President who appointed him, neoliberal inclinations. He was instrumental in creating sentencing guidelines for federal judges that he later conceded were too rigid. He wrote a book on regulatory reform. And one of his proudest legislative achievements was working with Kennedy to deregulate the airline industry.

But he has an admirable temperament. Toobin called him “the sunniest individual to serve on the Supreme Court in a great many years.” Seated on a bench next to a lot of intellectual loners— Antonin Scalia , Clarence Thomas , David Souter , Ginsburg herself—Breyer became a consensus seeker, if not always a consensus builder. He believed in reasoned discourse.

He had also learned, from watching Kennedy do business in the Senate, that compromise is how you get things done in government, and he understood that on an ideologically divided court the power is in the middle. Being a split-the-difference centrist, like his predecessor Lewis Powell, and like the Justice he was closest to, Sandra Day O’Connor , suited his personality, too.

Breyer loved the job and was reluctant to announce his retirement, throwing liberals who feared another R.B.G. fiasco into a panic. He stepped down at the end of the 2021-22 term, in time for President Joe Biden to put one of Breyer’s former clerks, Ketanji Brown Jackson , on the Court. Breyer is now back where he started, as a professor of administrative law at Harvard. Happily for the law school, there are now many dedicated bike lanes in Cambridge.

Horwitz was not entirely right about what George H. W. Bush called “the vision thing.” Beneath Breyer’s pragmatic, let-us-reason-together persona is the soul of a Warren Court liberal. The Warren Court is where Breyer’s judicial career began. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1964, he clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg. It was, he said, “a court with a mission.” The mission was to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown is Breyer’s touchstone. He calls the decision “an affirmation of justice itself.” Brown was decided in 1954, and it governs only segregation in public schools. This is because the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws,” the right under which Brown was decided, is a right that can be exercised only against states and their agencies. But Breyer understands Brown in a broader sense. He believes that the reasoning in Brown leads to the condemnation of any and all discrimination that is within the reach of government to eliminate.

Extending the spirit of Brown is what the 1964 Civil Rights Act was designed to do. The act was signed into law in July, just as Breyer was beginning his clerkship, and it did something that Congress had tried once before, in 1875: make it unlawful for public accommodations like hotels, theatres, and restaurants to discriminate on the basis of race. In 1883, in a blockbuster decision, the Supreme Court had thrown out that earlier act as unconstitutional. It ruled that the government cannot tell private parties whom they must serve.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act once again prohibited discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. But how are privately owned businesses like restaurants within the reach of the state? In October, 1964, three months after the act was signed into law, that question came before the Court in two challenges to the constitutionality of Title II: Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., concerning a motel in Georgia that refused to serve Black travellers, and Katzenbach v. McClung, concerning a restaurant in Birmingham, Ollie’s Barbecue, that refused to seat Black customers. (They could use a takeout window.)

The Court ruled that Congress gets its power to ban discrimination in public accommodations from the commerce clause in Article I of the Constitution. (“Congress shall have power . . . to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”) This holding required the Court to find that the Heart of Atlanta Motel and Ollie’s Barbecue were, in fact, part of interstate commerce. And the Court so found.

Since the motel was patronized by people travelling from one state to another, and since the ingredients for some of the food served at Ollie’s came from outside Alabama, the Court held that the motel and the restaurant were part of commerce “among the several states” and therefore within the power of Congress to regulate. The Court declared the 1883 ruling “inapposite and without precedential value,” and the decision in both cases was unanimous. Breyer thinks that they were the most important rulings of his clerkship.

There was another case with far-reaching effects that was decided during Breyer’s clerkship: Griswold v. Connecticut. The plaintiffs, Estelle Griswold and C. Lee Buxton, opened a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven and were arrested for counselling married couples about birth-control devices, which were illegal under the state’s anti-contraception law. Griswold and Buxton argued that, since the law was unconstitutional, they could not be prosecuted for advising women to break it. In a 7–2 decision, the Court agreed. What constitutional provision did the Connecticut law violate? The right to privacy.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion of the Court, and it is a classic of judicial inventiveness. Nowhere does the Constitution mention a right to privacy, but Douglas proposed that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” By this jurisprudential alchemy, the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments could be interpreted as defining a “zone of privacy” whose penumbra would extend to the marital bedroom.

Douglas concluded his opinion with an encomium to marriage. He got quite worked up about it. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” he wrote. “It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.” Douglas was sixty-six. A year after Griswold, he divorced his twenty-six-year-old third wife, Joan Martin, to marry Cathleen Heffernan, who was twenty-two.

Griswold became a key precedent in two landmark cases: Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex-marriage case, decided in 2015. “The right of privacy,” Harry Blackmun wrote for the Court in Roe, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” In Obergefell, Anthony Kennedy, also writing for the Court, quoted Douglas’s reflections on marriage in their entirety and added some emanations of his own. In addition to a privacy right, he declared, constitutional liberties extend “to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.” (In a dissent, Scalia said that he would “hide my head in a bag” before putting his name to some of Kennedy’s prose.)

The shape of Breyer’s Supreme Court career therefore has an emblematic significance, because it was bookended by two decisions that undid much of what the Warren Court achieved in Heart of Atlanta and Griswold. Breyer’s first major dissent came in 1995, in U.S. v. Lopez, a commerce-clause case; his last was in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade .

Lopez turned on the constitutionality of the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which made it a federal crime to possess a firearm in a school zone. In a 5–4 decision, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the act was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power under the commerce clause. It was the first time since 1936 that the Court had struck down a federal law for exceeding the commerce-clause power.

Much of the New Deal was made possible by the commerce clause. In his dissent, Breyer noted that more than a hundred federal laws include the phrase “affecting commerce.” How many was the Court bent on invalidating? Some, anyway. Five years later, in U.S. v. Morrison, the Court threw out provisions of the Violence Against Women Act on the ground of commerce-clause overreach.

Breyer’s dissent in Dobbs, in 2022, was joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor . The privacy right in Roe “does not stand alone,” they wrote. “The Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. . . . They are all part of the same constitutional fabric.” They wondered, again, how much the Court was prepared to unravel. In his concurrence, Thomas suggested that the Court might want to reconsider Griswold and Obergefell.

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What happened? Breyer has an explanation, and he lays it out in the new book. He thinks it’s all a matter of interpretation.

As Breyer points out, a majority of the Court now subscribes to the interpretive methods known as textualism and originalism. Textualism and originalism tend to be run together as types of what used to be called “strict construction” (a term that seems to have fallen out of use). But there is a difference. Textualism is primarily a way of interpreting statutes, and originalism is a way of interpreting the Constitution.

Textualists ask what the words of a statute literally mean. Information like legislative history or social-science data is largely irrelevant. Textualists don’t ask, “What would Congress have us do?” They just say, “What is the rule here?” and try to follow it.

Originalists, on the other hand, ask what the Framers would have them do. Originalists can consult the records of the Constitutional Convention (which are hardly comprehensive) and documents like the Federalist Papers (which is a collection of op-eds). But they claim to stick to the “original public understanding” of constitutional language—that is, what the words meant to the average voter in the eighteenth century. They do not invent rights that the Framers would not have recognized, as originalists think Douglas did in Griswold.

More recently, originalists have looked to something called “history and tradition,” highly malleable terms—whose history? which tradition?—by which they tend to mean things as they were prior to circa 1964. Writing for the Court in Dobbs, Samuel Alito explained that the decision turned on “whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition.” The constitutional right to abortion was then fifty years old. For women likely to rely on it, the right had existed for their entire lifetimes. But what mattered to the originalists was whether women could rely on it in the nineteenth century.

The use of race as a plus factor in college and university admissions is even older. The practice dates from the late nineteen-sixties, and has been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court three times: in 1978, in 2003, and in 2016. But the majority had little trouble wiping it out last term, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard . It is a bit brazen to be shouldering aside precedents under the banner of “tradition.”

Breyer sums up textualism and originalism as attempts to make judicial reasoning a science and to make law a list of rules. In our system of government, the Constitution is the big trump card. But it doesn’t come with a user manual. The document is basically a list of clauses—the commerce clause (sixteen words), the equal-protection clause (fourteen words), and so on. And the Constitution gives the reason for a clause only twice: in the patent-and-copyright clause in Article I and in the right-to-bear-arms clause in the Second Amendment. (We could add the preamble, the “We the People” clause, which gives the rationale for having a written constitution in the first place, a novel idea in 1787.)

Some constitutional clauses, like the requirement that the President be native-born, are rules, but many, like the equal-protection clause (the only reference to equality in the entire document), are principles. They do not mark out bright lines separating the constitutionally permitted from the constitutionally forbidden.

Courts, however, are obliged to draw those lines. Judges cannot conclude that the law is a gray area. Textualists and originalists believe that their approach draws the line at the right place. Breyer thinks that the idea that there is a single right place, good for all time, is a delusion, and that his approach, which he calls “pragmatism,” is the one best suited to the design of the American legal system. Pragmatism makes the system “workable” (a word Breyer uses many times) because it does not box us into rigid doctrines and anachronistic meanings.

Pragmatist judges therefore look to the law’s purposes, consequences, and values. They ask, “Why did the lawmakers write this? What are the real-world consequences for the way the Court interprets it? And what are the values that subtend the system of government that courts are a part of?” These are questions that literal readings can’t answer.

An originalist like Scalia, for example, thinks that the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment makes unconstitutional only punishments that would have been considered cruel and unusual in 1791, the year the amendment was ratified. In 1791, people were sentenced to death for theft. If we said that seems cruel and unusual today, Scalia would say, “Fine. Pass a law against it. But the Constitution does not forbid it.” When he was asked what punishment the Framers would have considered cruel and unusual, Scalia said, “Thumbscrews.”

To this, a pragmatist judge would say, “Then what is the point of having a constitution?” The words “cruel and unusual” were chosen by the Framers (in this case, James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights) because their meanings are not fixed. And that goes to the purpose of the clause. The Constitution does not prohibit cruel and unusual punishment because cruelty is bad and we’re against it. It prohibits punishment that most people would find excessive in order to preserve the public’s faith in the criminal-justice system. If we started executing people for stealing a loaf of bread today, the system would lose its legitimacy. Surely an originalist would agree that the Framers were big on legitimacy.

The same is true of many other clauses—for example, the free-speech clause in the First Amendment. Free speech is protected not because it’s a God-given right. It’s protected because, in a democracy, if you do not allow the losers to have their say, you cannot expect them to submit to the will of the winners. Free speech legitimizes majoritarian rule.

Breyer’s book is organized as a series of analyses of some twenty Supreme Court cases, most of which Breyer took part in during his time on the Court. Some are major cases, like District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the originalists found a right to possess a gun for self-defense in the Second Amendment, which says nothing about self-defense. (“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the eighteenth century are protected by the Second Amendment,” Scalia wrote in the Court’s opinion. Hmm. What happened to the Thumbscrews Doctrine?)

Other cases are perhaps less than major, like Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service, which answered the question of whether the federal government is a “person” capable of petitioning the Patent Trial and Appeal Board under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. (It is not.) Breyer explains how originalists and textualists decided each case and how he, as a pragmatist, decided them. His book is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical. It is addressed to non-lawyers.

It also seems weirdly naïve. Or maybe purposefully naïve. In most of the cases Breyer discusses, where there was disagreement on the Court it resulted not from differences in interpretive methods but from differences in politics. In almost every case, the originalists and textualists came down on the conservative side, restricting the powers of the federal government and expanding the powers of the states, and the pragmatists and “living constitutionalists” (another term that’s now largely avoided) came down on the liberal side.

What is naïve is to believe that the conservative Justices—which means, on the current Court, the six Justices appointed by Republican Presidents, though they are not always on the same page—would decide cases differently if they switched to another method of interpretation. Judicial reasoning doesn’t work that way. Judges pretty much know where they want to come out, and then they figure out a juridically respectable way of getting there.

Why would Breyer want to ignore, or seriously understate, the part that political ideology plays in Supreme Court decisions? The answer lies in an earlier book, “ The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics ,” based on a lecture he delivered at Harvard in 2021. It’s all about legitimacy.

Legitimacy is why the Warren Court was on a mission in 1964. The Supreme Court’s reputation—you could say its mystique—is all that it has. It cannot tax or spend. Only Congress can do those things, and only the President can send in the Army. When Southern school districts ignored Brown and refused to integrate, the Court was in danger of being exposed as a paper tiger. It was crucial, therefore, that everyone believe that the Justices were not making law, only finding it. The Constitution made them do it. That was the Court’s claim to legitimacy.

Breyer thinks that the Court still operates this way. All Justices, he says in “The Authority of the Court,” “studiously try to avoid deciding a case on the basis of ideology rather than law.” The reason that “different political groups so strongly support some persons for appointment to the Court and so strongly oppose others” is that people “confuse perceived personal ideology (inferred from party affiliation or that of the nominating executive) and professed judicial philosophy.”

But Presidents and Senate majorities certainly think they are appointing Justices who share their political beliefs, even when they profess to be simply looking for the most qualified jurist. Sometimes Presidents are wrong. Earl Warren, appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, no enthusiast of race-mixing, is a famous example. But that is not because Warren was apolitical. Warren was a Republican politician. He had been elected governor of California three times and had run for Vice-President on the ticket with Thomas E. Dewey, in 1948. For Warren, the political constituency that mattered when he became Chief Justice was not the President or Congress. It was the public.

He could see that, in the postwar era, public opinion was likely to favor expanded liberties—the United States was presenting itself, after all, as the leader of the free world—and although his court may sometimes have got a few paces ahead of public opinion, it was largely in step with the times. It was a liberal era. We are not living in a liberal era anymore, and the Court reflects this.

Politics is the art of governance. The Supreme Court is a branch of government, and is therefore a political body. Its decisions affect public life. If by “political” we mean “partisan,” we are still talking about governance, because partisanship is loyalty to a political ideology, normally instantiated in a political party. Politics, therefore, cannot not be partisan. Partisanship is how politics works. Even when politicians say, “This is no time for politics,” they are saying it for partisan reasons. They are saying it because it is good for their side to say it.

What makes the Court different from other political actors is stare decisis, the tradition of respecting its earlier decisions, something Congress does not have to worry about. There is no rule against overturning a precedent, though. So why has the Court been traditionally reluctant to do so? Why does Thomas’s suggestion that it might be time to overrule Griswold and Obergefell seem so radical? It’s because the Court’s legitimacy is intimately tied to the perception that, in making its rulings, it looks only to what the Constitution says and what the Court has previously decided. When the Court overturns a case, it has to make it appear as though the decision was wrong as a matter of law.

This is why Breyer insists that it’s all a matter of legal forensics, of what interpretive lenses the Justices use. He wants to preserve the authority of the Court. He wants to prevent the Justices from being seen as the puppets of politicians.

His toughest moment on the Court, for this reason, must have been Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, decided in 2007. In that case, the Court struck down a Seattle policy of using race as a factor in assigning students to high schools with the aim of attaining rough racial balance.

It was the kind of policy that the Court had approved a number of times since Brown. Now, in an opinion by John Roberts, the Court declared that it had had enough. Roberts ended with a memorable line, no doubt saved up for the right occasion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

After Roberts announced the Court’s opinion, on the last day of the term, Breyer delivered a speech from the bench. “Bristling with barely concealed anger,” according to an account by the legal scholar Lani Guinier, he accused the Court’s Republican appointees of voting their policy preferences. “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” he said.

In 2019, Breyer’s speech from the bench was published as a pamphlet by Brookings. The title he gave it was “Breaking the Promise of Brown.” ♦

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By Andrew Marantz

By Jonathan Blitzer

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

By Doreen St. Félix

The Importance of Ethics in Criminal Justice

This essay about the importance of ethics in the criminal justice system likens ethical standards to an undercurrent in an ocean, crucial yet often unseen, guiding the legal framework from beneath. It illustrates ethics as both a moral compass for practitioners, like detectives, and a protective immune system against corruption and bias. The narrative underscores the daily reality where criminal justice professionals face moral dilemmas and emphasizes that ethical vigilance is essential for maintaining public trust and the integrity of justice. It warns that neglecting these ethical standards can lead to systemic failure, impacting innocent lives and societal trust. Through imaginative analogies, the essay highlights how a culture of integrity and ethical awareness is vital for the criminal justice system to function effectively and justly.

How it works

In a world that often resembles a high-stakes drama, the significance of ethics within the criminal justice system is a storyline that deserves center stage. Think of the system as a vast ocean, with laws as its surface – visible, defined, and tangible. Yet, beneath this surface, in the depths where the sunlight struggles to reach, ethics swim, guiding the system’s course through unseen, yet treacherous waters. This silent undercurrent is what keeps the ship of justice afloat, navigating through the complexities of right and wrong, fairness, and bias.

Picture this: a detective, weighed down by the pressure to solve a high-profile case, finds himself at a moral crossroads. The easy path tempts with promises of quick resolution but ventures into murky ethical waters. Here, the detective’s internal compass, honed by a commitment to ethical integrity, becomes his guiding light, steering him away from compromise. This narrative is not just fiction; it’s a daily reality for many in the criminal justice field. The ethical principles they uphold are invisible shields protecting the sanctity of justice.

Now, let’s shift the lens to view ethics as the system’s immune system. Just as our bodies fight off infections, ethical vigilance works silently but persistently to resist the infection of corruption and misuse of power. In the absence of this immune response, the system would succumb to the diseases of injustice and bias, eroding public trust. Imagine a courtroom where fairness is the judge, accountability the jury, and respect for human dignity the law. This is the ideal, safeguarded by the unsung heroes who daily commit to ethical practice.

However, the path of ethics is not without its obstacles. It’s a tightrope walk over a canyon of moral dilemmas, where a misstep could mean a fall into the abyss of ethical violations. The high stakes of criminal justice decisions amplify these challenges, where the impact of choices can change lives forever. To navigate this tightrope, professionals need more than just knowledge of the law; they require a moral compass that points steadfastly towards justice, even when the winds of circumstance try to blow them off course.

The consequences of neglecting this ethical undercurrent are stark. Unethical actions can turn the criminal justice system into a shipwreck, with the wreckage impacting innocent lives and corroding the foundations of societal trust. To prevent this, the system itself must champion the cause of ethical vigilance, promoting a culture where ethical training and awareness are paramount, and where integrity is celebrated and rewarded.

In weaving the narrative of ethics into the fabric of the criminal justice system, we acknowledge its critical role in upholding justice. It’s a tale of heroism that often goes untold, yet it’s the force that maintains the balance between law and morality, ensuring the system serves its true purpose. As we look to the future, the continuous commitment to ethical vigilance will be the beacon that guides the criminal justice system through the storms, ensuring it remains a vessel worthy of society’s trust and confidence.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

• Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

• RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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Guest Essay

What Sentencing Could Look Like if Trump Is Found Guilty

By Norman L. Eisen

Mr. Eisen is the author of “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.”

For all the attention to and debate over the unfolding trial of Donald Trump in Manhattan, there has been surprisingly little of it paid to a key element: its possible outcome and, specifically, the prospect that a former and potentially future president could be sentenced to prison time.

The case — brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, against Mr. Trump — represents the first time in our nation’s history that a former president is a defendant in a criminal trial. As such, it has generated lots of debate about the case’s legal strength and integrity, as well as its potential impact on Mr. Trump’s efforts to win back the White House.

A review of thousands of cases in New York that charged the same felony suggests something striking: If Mr. Trump is found guilty, incarceration is an actual possibility. It’s not certain, of course, but it is plausible.

Jury selection has begun, and it’s not too soon to talk about what the possibility of a sentence, including a prison sentence, would look like for Mr. Trump, for the election and for the country — including what would happen if he is re-elected.

The case focuses on alleged interference in the 2016 election, which consisted of a hush-money payment Michael Cohen, the former president’s fixer at the time, made in 2016 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg is arguing that the cover-up cheated voters of the chance to fully assess Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

This may be the first criminal trial of a former president in American history, but if convicted, Mr. Trump’s fate is likely to be determined by the same core factors that guide the sentencing of every criminal defendant in New York State Court.

Comparable cases. The first factor is the base line against which judges measure all sentences: how other defendants have been treated for similar offenses. My research encompassed almost 10,000 cases of felony falsifying business records that have been prosecuted across the state of New York since 2015. Over a similar period, the Manhattan D.A. has charged over 400 of these cases . In roughly the first year of Mr. Bragg’s tenure, his team alone filed 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 people or companies.

Contrary to claims that there will be no sentence of incarceration for falsifying business records, when a felony conviction involves serious misconduct, defendants can be sentenced to some prison time. My analysis of the most recent data indicates that approximately one in 10 cases in which the most serious charge at arraignment is falsifying business records in the first degree and in which the court ultimately imposes a sentence, results in a term of imprisonment.

To be clear, these cases generally differ from Mr. Trump’s case in one important respect: They typically involve additional charges besides just falsifying records. That clearly complicates what we might expect if Mr. Trump is convicted.

Nevertheless, there are many previous cases involving falsifying business records along with other charges where the conduct was less serious than is alleged against Mr. Trump and prison time was imposed. For instance, Richard Luthmann was accused of attempting to deceive voters — in his case, impersonating New York political figures on social media in an attempt to influence campaigns. He pleaded guilty to three counts of falsifying business records in the first degree (as well as to other charges). He received a sentence of incarceration on the felony falsification counts (although the sentence was not solely attributable to the plea).

A defendant in another case was accused of stealing in excess of $50,000 from her employer and, like in this case, falsifying one or more invoices as part of the scheme. She was indicted on a single grand larceny charge and ultimately pleaded guilty to one felony count of business record falsification for a false invoice of just under $10,000. She received 364 days in prison.

To be sure, for a typical first-time offender charged only with run-of-the-mill business record falsification, a prison sentence would be unlikely. On the other hand, Mr. Trump is being prosecuted for 34 counts of conduct that might have changed the course of American history.

Seriousness of the crime. Mr. Bragg alleges that Mr. Trump concealed critical information from voters (paying hush money to suppress an extramarital relationship) that could have harmed his campaign, particularly if it came to light after the revelation of another scandal — the “Access Hollywood” tape . If proved, that could be seen not just as unfortunate personal judgment but also, as Justice Juan Merchan has described it, an attempt “to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.”

History and character. To date, Mr. Trump has been unrepentant about the events alleged in this case. There is every reason to believe that will not change even if he is convicted, and lack of remorse is a negative at sentencing. Justice Merchan’s evaluation of Mr. Trump’s history and character may also be informed by the other judgments against him, including Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling that Mr. Trump engaged in repeated and persistent business fraud, a jury finding that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll and a related defamation verdict by a second jury.

Justice Merchan may also weigh the fact that Mr. Trump has been repeatedly held in contempt , warned , fined and gagged by state and federal judges. That includes for statements he made that exposed witnesses, individuals in the judicial system and their families to danger. More recently, Mr. Trump made personal attacks on Justice Merchan’s daughter, resulting in an extension of the gag order in the case. He now stands accused of violating it again by commenting on witnesses.

What this all suggests is that a term of imprisonment for Mr. Trump, while far from certain for a former president, is not off the table. If he receives a sentence of incarceration, perhaps the likeliest term is six months, although he could face up to four years, particularly if Mr. Trump chooses to testify, as he said he intends to do , and the judge believes he lied on the stand . Probation is also available, as are more flexible approaches like a sentence of spending every weekend in jail for a year.

We will probably know what the judge will do within 30 to 60 days of the end of the trial, which could run into mid-June. If there is a conviction, that would mean a late summer or early fall sentencing.

Justice Merchan would have to wrestle in the middle of an election year with the potential impact of sentencing a former president and current candidate.

If Mr. Trump is sentenced to a period of incarceration, the reaction of the American public will probably be as polarized as our divided electorate itself. Yet as some polls suggest — with the caveat that we should always be cautious of polls early in the race posing hypothetical questions — many key swing state voters said they would not vote for a felon.

If Mr. Trump is convicted and then loses the presidential election, he will probably be granted bail, pending an appeal, which will take about a year. That means if any appeals are unsuccessful, he will most likely have to serve any sentence starting sometime next year. He will be sequestered with his Secret Service protection; if it is less than a year, probably in Rikers Island. His protective detail will probably be his main company, since Mr. Trump will surely be isolated from other inmates for his safety.

If Mr. Trump wins the presidential election, he can’t pardon himself because it is a state case. He will be likely to order the Justice Department to challenge his sentence, and department opinions have concluded that a sitting president could not be imprisoned, since that would prevent the president from fulfilling the constitutional duties of the office. The courts have never had to address the question, but they could well agree with the Justice Department.

So if Mr. Trump is convicted and sentenced to a period of incarceration, its ultimate significance is probably this: When the American people go to the polls in November, they will be voting on whether Mr. Trump should be held accountable for his original election interference.

What questions do you have about Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial so far?

Please submit them below. Our trial experts will respond to a selection of readers in a future piece.

Norman L. Eisen investigated the 2016 voter deception allegations as counsel for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump and is the author of “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Hundreds of Jan. 6 Prosecutions—Including Donald Trump’s—Are Suddenly in Peril at the Supreme Court

Will the Supreme Court jeopardize the prosecution of more than 350 defendants involved with Jan. 6, including Donald Trump, by gutting the federal statute that prohibits their unlawful conduct? Maybe so. Tuesday’s oral arguments in Fischer v. United States were rough sledding for the government, as the conservative justices lined up to thwap Joe Biden’s Department of Justice for allegedly overreaching in its pursuit of Jan. 6 convictions. Six members of the court took turns wringing their hands over the application of a criminal obstruction law to the rioters, fretting that they faced overly harsh penalties for participating in the violent attack. Unmentioned but lurking in the background was Trump himself, who can wriggle out of two major charges against him with a favorable decision in this case.

There are, no doubt, too many criminal laws whose vague wording gives prosecutors near-limitless leeway to threaten citizens with decades in prison. But this isn’t one of them. Congress wrote a perfectly legible law and the overwhelming majority of judges have had no trouble applying it. It would be all too telling if the Supreme Court decides to pretend the statute is somehow too sweeping or jumbled to use as a tool of accountability for Jan. 6.

Start with the obstruction law itself, known as Section 1552(c), which Congress enacted to close loopholes that Enron exploited to impede probes into its misconduct . The provision is remarkably straightforward—a far cry from the ambiguous, sloppy, or muddled laws that typically flummox the judiciary. It’s a mainstay of the Department of Justice’s “Capitol siege” prosecutions, deployed in about a quarter of all cases. Overall, 350 people face charges under this statute, Trump among them , and the DOJ has used it to secure the convictions of about 150 rioters . It targets anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” And it clarifies that an official proceeding includes “a proceeding before the Congress.”

The government argues that some rioters attempted to “obstruct” an “official proceeding” by halting the count of electoral votes through “corrupt” means. That includes Joseph Fischer, the defendant in the current case. Fischer, who served as a police officer before Jan. 6, allegedly texted that the protest “might get violent”; that “they should storm the capital and drag all the democrates [sic] into the street and have a mob trial”; and that protesters should “take democratic congress to the gallows,” because they “can’t vote if they can’t breathe..lol.” Video evidence shows Fischer assaulting multiple police officers on the afternoon of Jan. 6 after breaching the Capitol.

Would anyone seriously argue that this person did not attempt to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding? For a time, it seemed not: 14 of the 15 federal judges—all but Judge Carl Nichols in this case—considering the charge in various Jan. 6 cases agreed that it applied to violent rioters bent on stopping the electoral count. So did every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit except one, Judge Gregory Katsas. Both Nichols and Katsas were appointed by Trump. Their crusade to kneecap the law caught SCOTUS’ attention, and the court decided to intervene despite overwhelming consensus among lower court judges. The Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for Trump: Two of the four charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the former president’s Jan. 6 prosecution revolve around this offense. A ruling that eviscerates the obstruction law would arguably cut out the heart of the indictment.

At least three justices seem ready to do just that. Justice Clarence Thomas—back on the bench after yesterday’s unexplained absence —grilled Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar over the law’s application to Jan. 6. “There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings. Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?” Thomas asked, as if to nail the Justice Department for inconsistency and reveal some improper motive for wielding the law against violent insurrectionists. Justice Neil Gorsuch trolled Prelogar by alluding to Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s infamous fire alarm incident . “Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” he asked. Justice Samuel Alito joined in to ask about “protests in the courtroom” when an audience member interrupts the justices and “delays the proceeding for five minutes.”

“For all the protests that have occurred in this court,” Alito noted pointedly, “the Justice Department has not charged any serious offenses, and I don’t think any one of those protestors has been sentenced to even one day in prison.” Why, he wondered, weren’t they charged under the obstruction statute?

Alito, audibly angry, continued: “Yesterday protestors blocked the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and disrupted traffic in San Francisco,” he told Prelogar. “What if something similar to that happened all around the Capitol so … all the bridges from Virginia were blocked, and members from Virginia who needed to appear at a hearing couldn’t get there or were delayed in getting there? Would that be a violation of this provision?”

To be clear, this is trolling: There is simply no comparison between a violent attack on the Capitol and protests that take the form of civil disobedience. And these justices expressed no similar concern about an ongoing red-state effort to persecute peaceful protesters who participate in Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Gorsuch and Alito’s hypotheticals ignore the reality that there are two layers of protection between minor protests and this rather major law. First, the Constitution affords prosecutorial discretion to the executive branch, allowing the Department of Justice to decide when an illegal “protest” is dangerous enough to warrant the use of a criminal law like the obstruction statute. Second, prosecutors must always prove the alleged offense to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, creating a democratic check on the abusive use of a stringent law to punish a silly crime.

Prelogar highlighted this latter point, explaining that juries have indeed acquitted Jan. 6 defendants of obstruction. If prosecutors ever apply this (or any other) criminal statute to a questionable set of facts, they may always be thwarted by a jury. That is how the system is meant to work.

This kind of behavior from Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito is no surprise at this point. And the liberal justices countered them as best they could. What’s troubling is that the other conservative justices jumped in to join the pile-on. Chief Justice John Roberts insistently pressed Prelogar to prove that the Justice Department has interpreted and enforced the obstruction law consistently in the past. This question ignored the fact that, as Prelogar reminded the court, there has never been any crime like the assault on the Capitol , so the agency had no prior opportunity to apply the law in any similar way.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the Justice Department didn’t really need this statute because it has other laws at its disposal. “There are six other counts in the indictment here,” he told Prelogar. Why “aren’t those six counts good enough just from the Justice Department’s perspective given that they don’t have any of the hurdles?” Of course, the DOJ brought the obstruction charge specifically because it was more serious than the others; prosecutors felt an obligation to enforce Congress’ strong protections against intrusions on official proceedings, including those in the Capitol. Kavanaugh appears to think the DOJ should have settled for a smattering of lesser charges. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was not so obtuse; she earnestly worried that the statute was too broad and fished around for narrowing constructions. Yet she seemed unsatisfied with the many options Prelogar provided to keep the law limited to the most egregious interruptions of government business.

What all six justices seemed tempted to do was rip up Section 1552(c) because it happens to include another sentence that applies to the destruction of evidence and other official documents. Jan. 6 rioters didn’t destroy evidence, this argument goes, so they can’t be culpable under a law. That reading is untenable , something Prelogar impressively reinforced at every turn on Tuesday, but it may be attractive if a majority wants to defuse this statute before it’s used against Trump in a court of law.

Smith’s indictment of the former president for his participation in Jan. 6 doesn’t entirely hinge on obstruction. It does, however, weave obstruction into both the facts and the legal theory of the case, placing it at the center of a broader criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. If SCOTUS defuses the law now, Smith would have to scrap two of four charges and restructure the entire indictment, making it that much easier for Trump to demand further delay and, eventually, evade a conviction.

The justices know this. They should have been on their best behavior on Tuesday to avoid any glimmer of impropriety. It was already profoundly disturbing that Thomas sat on the case given his wife’s involvement with the attempt to overturn the election. The other justices’ faux concern about overcriminalization of protesters only added to the foul smell emanating from arguments. There’s no telling how Fischer will turn out; maybe the liberal justices will help their colleagues rediscover their better angels behind the scenes. From Tuesday’s vantage point, though, the argument was a bleak reminder of how easy it is for cloistered jurists to wish away the massive stakes of a case like this.