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Essays on Justice

Hook examples for justice essays, anecdotal hook.

Step into a courtroom, where the pursuit of justice unfolds before our eyes. As the gavel strikes and decisions are made, the impact of justice reverberates through society. Join me on a journey to explore the complexities and significance of justice.

Quotation Hook

""Justice delayed is justice denied."" These words, attributed to William E. Gladstone, emphasize the importance of timely and fair justice. Let's delve into the profound implications of justice in our world.

Justice and Human Rights Hook

Justice and human rights are inextricably linked. Explore how the concept of justice intersects with the protection of fundamental human rights, shaping our understanding of justice on a global scale.

Historical Perspectives on Justice Hook

Justice has evolved over centuries, often in response to historical events and societal changes. Delve into the historical context of justice, from ancient legal systems to pivotal moments in the fight for civil rights.

Justice in the Legal System Hook

Justice is a cornerstone of the legal system. Analyze the principles and mechanisms that underpin justice in legal proceedings, from the presumption of innocence to the role of juries in delivering verdicts.

Social Justice and Equity Hook

Justice extends beyond legal proceedings to issues of social justice and equity. Investigate how societies address inequality, discrimination, and the pursuit of a more just and equitable world.

Modern Challenges in Justice Hook

Justice remains a pressing concern in the modern world. Explore contemporary challenges and debates surrounding justice, including issues related to criminal justice reform, restorative justice, and access to justice.

Ida B. Wells: a Crusader for Justice

Examining the juvenile transfer law: balancing justice and rehabilitation, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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Theme of Justice in "To Kill a Mockingbird" Through Key Quotes

What is the true definition of justice, different types of justice and ways that the term might be defined, justice: what’s the right thing to do by michael j. sandel, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Poverty and The Existing Gap Between The Rich and Poor

Law, justice and judicial power, analysis of the concept of justice from plato’s point of view, martin luther king's speech: 'i have a dream', get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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Injustice in Treatment of Disabled People in Society

The juvenile justice system as a major concern of law enforcement, political and social injustice in america, guilty or not guilty: the delicate balance of seeking for justice in 12 angry men, american criminal justice system: the different stages of an arrest, religion and critical thinking: a union created by dostoyevsky, criminal liability: insanity and automatism, analysis of the shared relationship between ‘the press’ and ‘liberty’, what is the difference between restorative and retributive justice, the survival of the middle passage: the path to justice, 1000 words on respect: the foundation of law and society, comparison of restorative and retributive/punitive justice, the nature of us civil justice system in a civil action by jonathan harr, the moral issue of torture and war crimes, the case of lagrand brothers, a landmark case of dollree mapp in the american justice system, review on a judicial management, the  procedure for compounding, an analysis of the differences between the british and american criminal justice systems, contrast liability in tort with contractual liability.

Justice, in its broadest sense, is the principle that people receive that which they deserve, with the interpretation of what then constitutes "deserving" being impacted upon by numerous fields, with many differing viewpoints and perspectives, including the concepts of moral correctness based on ethics, rationality, law, religion, equity and fairness.

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Lawyers, the Legal Profession & Access to Justice in the United States: A Brief History

by Robert W. Gordon

In no profession is the gulf greater between ideals and practices than it is for lawyers. Ideally, justice is a universal good: the law protects equally the rights of the rich and the poor, the giant corporation and the small business, the innocent and the criminal accused. The ethical imperative that lawyers must zealously serve the interests of their clients can be justified, and reconciled with the goal of universal justice, only if all other affected parties (including the clients’ adversaries) will be competently represented as well. In practice, of course, access to the complex and expensive procedures of law and the services of lawyers is largely determined by clients’ ability to pay: the major share of legal services goes to business entities and wealthy people. The lawyers who enjoy the greatest professional success and prestige do most of their work on behalf of the rich and powerful. 1

This essay examines the history of access to justice — chiefly civil justice, with a brief note on criminal defense — and the role of lawyers and organized legal professions in promoting and restricting that access. Traditionally, access to justice has meant at minimum the effective capacity to bring claims to a court, or to defend oneself against such claims. Although many courts allow parties to represent themselves, it is clear that effective access usually requires the services of a competent lawyer, since lawyers hold the monopoly of rights of practice in courts and the skills and experience that accrue from that practice. The costs of litigation, however, are very high — in court costs, administrative costs, witness fees, and lawyers’ fees — so much so that even middle-class parties are foreclosed from using the courts for any but routine transactions unless they can tap into financing from some other source, such as contingent fees and attorney-fee awards paid by the adverse party, or state-subsidized legal services.

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In the modern world, access to justice requires more than the capacity to litigate in courts. It requires help with navigating the mazes of bureaucratic government and filling out its forms, and with contesting adverse government actions. It requires help in planning for major life events, like founding a business, adopting a child, or divorcing a spouse. It requires effective assistance with challenging adverse actions of business corporations or professionals, say, as employees or customers. It requires access to powerful decision-makers, or agents in a position to influence them. Lawyers are not exclusive providers of such out-of-court services — they have to compete with accountants, financial consultants, and lobbyists, among others — but they tend to dominate.

In the last century, legal professions, governments, and charitable providers have taken small, partial steps to provide access to legal processes and legal advice to people who could not otherwise afford them. By doing so, they have inched closer to the ideals of universal justice. They have also, on occasion, acted to restrict access to law by the poor and powerless. Despite inspiring rhetoric — and more inspiring models and exemplars — that American lawyers use to trumpet their commitment to equal justice for all, they have generally served their own interests before those of the public, in particular the poor and economically struggling. They serve best the rich and powerful, serve some middle-class clients and interests to the extent that it generates adequate fees, and, with notable exceptions, either serve minimally or not at all virtually everyone else.

Before 1900, mentions in Anglo-American legal records of aid to the poor are scattered. Most of the references are to judges who appointed counsel to poor clients or to lawyers who voluntarily took their cases.

Medieval canon law was full of injunctions to lawyers to serve persons too poor to pay their fees, and “persons of humble status” were frequent enough litigants to suggest that some lawyers did. 2 Common lawyers also recognized some duties to the poor, codified in statute in 1495, when

Parliament provided . . . that poor persons could petition to plead in forma pauperis in all courts of record without the payment of any court fees, and provided further that the Chancellor and Justices should assign to such poor persons attorneys and learned counsel who should give their counsels without taking any reward. 3

Lawyers’ fees in medieval times were not high per case (most serjeants-at-law made their serious money via retainers), but English law was already so technical that no one could navigate pleading rules without a lawyer. Scattered reports refer to poor litigants represented by appointed or volunteer counsel: there is no way to know how frequently. It is likely that most poor persons’ disputes were heard in more informal courts like the Court of Requests, or manorial or borough courts. Before the early 18th century, middle-class litigants like tradesmen and well-off farmers appeared frequently in common-law courts. But as long ago as the mid-18th century, lawyers’ fees and court costs had escalated above even most middle-class pocketbooks. 4

Until the mid-18th century, a criminal accused was not allowed a lawyer to contest the facts of the cases against him, but had to conduct his own defense. This began to change around the mid-18th century, when lawyers were permitted, but without pay.

With respect to criminal defense, reflecting the colonists’ experience on the receiving end of imperial prosecution, the new republic definitively rejected earlier English practice by providing federal and state constitutional rights to counsel in criminal cases. They provided no funding to support the right, but in serious felony cases, especially for murder, courts would often appoint prominent lawyers to defend without pay. They often welcomed the chance for publicity in notorious trials.

Most small claims for civil justice in the earlier 19th century were pursued without lawyers in local informal tribunals, like justice of the peace courts or county courts. Anyone, including wives, minors, and slaves, could come under the jurisdiction of these courts, which were regulatory agencies and enforcers of local laws as well as dispute-settlers. Yet even in regular trial and appellate courts, the reports show many cases with lawyers litigating relatively small sums like $50 to $100. Entry barriers to the profession were almost nil in most states, so litigants could have the benefit of low-cost advice.

Subsidized advice in the United States to help poor people deal with social and legal problems began with the Working Women’s Protective Union in 1863 in New York, which helped workers collect fraudulently withheld wages. The union’s example gradually spread to other cities. Staffed, at first, mostly by volunteer women nonlawyers, the Chicago Protective Agency for Women and Children expanded the model. By 1905, it had a paid staff and was handling four thousand cases. The Protective Agency also brought wage claims, but specialized in helping victims of domestic violence, who were often ignored by courts. Around the same time, the Chicago Bureau of Justice was founded. Its clients were mostly poor people with small debts to tradesmen, landlords, and mortgage lenders. Like the Protective Agency, it distrusted the formal legal system: it saw many judges as corrupt and the lower bar as incompetent. The two Chicago organizations merged in 1905 to form the Legal Aid Society of Chicago. 5

New York City opened its own Legal Aid Society in 1900, largely to aid floods of newly arrived Jewish immigrants. The society grew out of an earlier bureau giving legal advice to German immigrants. Unlike the women’s protective unions, New York Legal Aid was mostly staffed by lawyers and defined its work as strictly legal rather than social work. But it was also strongly paternalistic, seeking to educate in American values those whom the lawyers saw as quarrelsome litigious Jews. It generally sought only money damages for clients rather than seeking broader solutions to their family problems, and refused to act if defendants had no assets.

In the early-20th-century wave of professionalization, social work emerged as a recognized credentialed profession. Lawyers, spearheaded by new national and local bar associations, sought to raise their own professional standards with new educational and bar exam requirements. Among lawyers, Reginald Heber Smith of Boston became the most prominent advocate for legal aid with his Carnegie Foundation Report on Justice and the Poor (1919), an indictment of unequal access to justice that was the leading manifesto for the legal-aid movement for the rest of the century. 6 Smith maintained that providing lawyers for the poor and people of moderate means was an elementary requirement of justice, which the legal profession had an obligation to supply rather than leave to charity.

His report ignored the existence of substantial women’s legal-aid organizations. He and his disciples fought a running battle with the social workers, insisting that law was a masculine sphere in which clients could exercise legal rights only with the help of a trained lawyer. Eventually, these quarrels were resolved by compromise, with the recognition that many poor clients’ problems could not be addressed solely by means of the law. Smith estimated in 1919 that about $600,000 would suffice to fund adequate legal-aid services in the nation’s cities — a contribution of $5 per lawyer — but complained that lawyers and their guilds were mostly indifferent to the responsibility to supply it.

Some bar leaders continued to promote legal aid, but the rank-and-file remained apathetic and sometimes actively hostile. Until the mid-1960s, the American Bar Association (ABA) condemned as socialism the idea of state-funded — as opposed to bar- and charity-funded — civil legal services, just as the American Medical Association had condemned Medicare. Most urban legal-aid programs remained severely underfunded, unable to accept most potential clients, and prohibited from helping clients divorce or go bankrupt for fear of offending charitable funders. These programs were averse to taking adversarial stances against landlords or businesses, favoring conciliation rather than the vindication of rights. 7

The landscape changed in 1965 with the funding of the Office of Equal Opportunity Legal Services Program (since reorganized as the Legal Services Corporation, or LSC) as a component of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. In a major shift of policy, national bar leaders at the ABA supported this program at the time and have since become its stalwart defenders against multiple political attacks. Federal services expanded the total national legal aid budget from under $5 million per year to $321 million in 1980–1981.

Program lawyers, including many top graduates of elite law schools, saw a much more ambitious role for the LSC than traditional legal aid. Rather than simply trying to help clients solve their problems one by one, they favored bringing strategic test-case suits before sympathetic liberal federal judges, and helping client groups like welfare recipients to form organizations capable of making their own demands. Their most controversial efforts were the work of program-funded California Rural Legal Assistance lawyers for Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers and program lawyers’ support for the militant National Welfare Rights Organization, which lobbied for a right to universal basic income.

The lawyers made fierce enemies among those interests that their clients sued. These included Governor Ronald Reagan of California (as president, he tried to abolish the program in 1981, and succeeded in cutting its budget by 25 percent); local and national welfare officials; real-estate interests targeted by new tenants’ organizations; established city patronage machines; and — not least — local lawyers and bar associations unhappy about competition from the new legal-services bar. The battle over federal legal services has continued since.

The LSC survives with the backing of elite lawyers, the ABA, and the judiciary, but under many and increasing restrictions on the kinds of clients and cases it can accept. The legal-services offices it funds may not bring class actions, lobby legislators, or represent unions, noncitizens, prisoners, or organizations promoting abortion, school desegregation, or welfare reform. 8 The general aim of conservatives has been to limit LSC-funded lawyers to individual personal aid, and to steer them away from actions with collective consequences like law reform, class actions, impact litigation, or aid to political organizing. 9

In the same political moment as the founding of the Legal Services Program, the Ford Foundation and other grantors supplied funding to create “public interest” law firms that would supply the resources to pursue systemic reform projects affecting the poor. Ford also funded clinical legal education in law schools. The clinics have supplied a significant proportion of liberal-progressive lawyering. These efforts supplemented the longstanding work of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), venerable nonprofits funded by subscribers, to seek court decisions favorable to their causes (African American equality for LDF; first, labor organizing and, later, free expression generally and women’s rights for the ACLU).

Institutionalized pro bono lawyering — although still sparse in relation to the perceived need — came out of the same generation as the lawyers who staffed the Legal Services Program. It has persisted and expanded, in part as a means to attract new associates to corporate practice and give them some on-the-job training with real clients. Most pro bono work is performed by lawyers in large firms, who often collaborate effectively with established public interest firms to fund and staff major litigation efforts. Law firm pro bono services now exceed in value the entire federal legal-services budget. Some firms also fund public interest fellowships, as the global Skadden firm does with the Skadden Fellowships.

Like LSC lawyers, however, though for different reasons, law firm pro bono lawyers are restricted in the types of work they are allowed to take on: they generally have to avoid clients such as environmental or labor interests whose general aims may be adverse to the firm’s paying clients. 10 Many bar associations have flirted with proposals to make some pro bono service mandatory, but have abandoned the idea in the face of member opposition. 11 Some state court judges, however, have strongly supported pro bono work. In 2012, New York State made performance of at least 50 hours of pro bono work by students during law school a condition of their admission to the bar. Yet reliable estimates are that, nationwide, American lawyers, on average, perform about half an hour of pro bono work, broadly defined, per year. They make only derisory financial contributions to legal-aid and public interest organizations. 12

At the same time that bar associations — formed and dominated for the early part of the 20th century by elite lawyers — were mostly ignoring calls for civil justice for the poor and middle-class, they were actively campaigning against lawyers for a particular kind of client: plaintiffs’ personal-injury lawyers. Personal-injury lawsuits proliferated in the late nineteenth century as a response to the large-scale carnage of the industrial age: injuries and deaths from mining operations, railroads, street railways, and, eventually, automobiles. A specialized bar, mostly Jewish and night-school trained, developed to serve the injured and their families. They took a contingent fee: 30 to 40 percent of any damages recovered, nothing if they lost. The elite lawyers who represented businesses like railroads and streetcar companies tried to close down the night schools. They used the new bar associations to restrict entry to practice, to draw up ethical codes targeting personal-injury lawyers with prohibitions on advertising and soliciting clients, and to discipline the lawyers for violating the codes. 13 (The Supreme Court struck down the prohibitions on advertising in 1977, though the Court has upheld most restrictions on soliciting paying clients. 14 )

After World War II, the personal-injury lawyers seemed to have prevailed in that battle. They formed a powerful trade association, the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA; since renamed the American Association for Justice), that lobbied legislatures and argued in courts for broader theories of liability and damage awards. The ATLA portrayed the plaintiffs’ lawyers as populist champions, representing the little guy against wealthy and well-lawyered corporations. 15 Their cause was aided by the expansions of liability to include strict liability for defective products (such as pharmaceuticals) and changes in the civil procedure rules to favor class actions and multiparty litigation; and by the Supreme Court decision invalidating the bar’s prohibition on advertising.

The defense bar struck back during the general business revolt against regulation beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Corporate and insurance practitioners warned of a “litigation explosion” of worthless claims that would make American businesses uncompetitive. The trial lawyers were portrayed as greedy exploiters of naive or opportunistic plaintiffs, looking to score settlements out of nuisance suits supported by “junk science.” 16 Some of the critiques were valid, such as that plaintiff and defendant class action lawyers sometimes colluded against the interests of the injured to settle cases early and cheaply, assisted by trial judges trying to clear their dockets. 17 The “litigation explosion” claims have proved mostly mythic, and “junk science” was surely as widely used by defendants (think tobacco) as plaintiffs. But the propaganda of the “tort reform” movement was a huge public relations and political success. 18 Federal and state legislation and court decisions have put limits on both punitive and ordinary damage claims, sometimes imposing strict caps on liability that have the effect of removing lawyers’ incentives to take complex cases. 19 Congress has allowed class action defendants to remove cases to federal courts that are expected to treat plaintiffs less generously. 20

Most observers have concluded that the chief defect of the personal-injury contingent-fee system for handling tort claims is not that it encourages frivolous claims, but that it filters out too many meritorious claims because they do not promise to yield an adequate recovery. 21 Its other main defect is its inefficiency: about 50 percent of recoveries are eaten up by administrative costs, including lawyers’ fees. 22 Some reforms have been proposed, such as enabling outside investors to fund litigation for the big, mass tort claims, which would require loosening ethical prohibitions on fee-sharing with nonlawyers. 23

In the American legal system, in which courts have ample authority to make law through precedent and constitutional rulings, it is not surprising that interest groups should use lawsuits as vehicles of policy-making. In the heyday of what is now called classical legalism (1870–1932), many such suits were brought by corporations to invalidate Progressive Era legislation adverse to their interests. But social movements for subordinated groups have used the same vehicles. In the 19th century, antislavery lawyers brought freedom suits for their slave clients and sought to invalidate the fugitive slave laws and prevent the extension of slavery into new territories.

The most famous and effective uses of lawsuits to create new rights were, of course, those of civil rights and civil liberties organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Lawyers’ Guild, and the ACLU, among others, on behalf of African Americans, women, political and religious dissenters, labor, the disabled, and gays and lesbians. This was lawyering for a cause, but also lawyering for clients who could not find other lawyers. The NAACP and other movement lawyers represented black criminal defendants whom no Southern lawyer, black or white, could act for without risking loss of all his other clients, as well as movement activists and demonstrators served with injunctions or thrown into jail. Guild lawyers acted for accused communists shunned by the respectable bar. The ACLU was founded to represent pariahs like labor organizers and anti-World War I protestors. 24 These movements were largely staffed by lawyers marginal to the higher reaches of their profession: racial minorities, Jews, women, and a few maverick patricians.

As with federal legal services, the successes of these legal strategies on behalf of social movements inspired attempts to cripple the lawyers and legal organizations that staffed them. In the civil rights era after Brown v. Board of Education , the cream of the establishment bar in the South worked with officials to hobble the public interest lawyers who brought claims to challenge racial segregation and defend protestors from arrest and prosecution. The states demanded lists of NAACP members, accused lawyers in group practices of ethical violations like soliciting clients, and brought suits for stirring up litigation. 25 Most of these efforts were ultimately rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which carved out an exception to the antisolicitation rules for nonprofit public interest lawyers. 26 In the civil rights era, liberal Congresses and judges also created new avenues for private plaintiffs to enforce antidiscrimination statutes, often through the incentive that, if successful, their lawyers could recover attorney fees from the losing side.

“Equal justice under law” sounds like an uncontroversial slogan. But claims to equal rights are also claims to redistribution of resources, status, and authority: when groups shut out of the justice system get lawyers to make those claims effective, the result can be to sharply challenge existing hierarchies of wealth, power, and status. The rights revolution provoked a severe backlash.

Conservative Supreme Courts since the 1980s have cut back the doctrines and remedies favored by liberal courts in the 1960s and 1970s. Conservative judges are generally reluctant to find that Congress has authorized private rights of action unless it has said so explicitly. 27 They are more likely to insist on proof of discriminatory intent, as well as disparate impact, in hiring practices; and to disfavor comprehensive remedies such as structural orders to desegregate school systems or to institute compensatory affirmative action hiring plans.

The Court has also made plaintiffs’ cases more difficult to prove and finance. It has tightened pleading rules to impose more procedural roadblocks to get to discovery; heightened plaintiffs’ burdens of proof while enlarging defenses; severely cut back on punitive damages awards; and made it much harder for public interest plaintiffs to recover attorney’s fees by denying fee awards if defendants agree to settle. 28 In an important string of recent decisions, the Court has approved the now widespread practices of mandatory arbitration clauses in employment and consumer contracts, by which employers require their employees, and consumer products and financial services sellers require their customers, to submit all of their disputes to arbitration and to forgo class actions. The Court has held that federal law preempts and invalidates many state laws that attempt to regulate such practices. 29 By denying plaintiffs the ability to aggregate claims, the Court effectively precludes them from addressing and trying to deter and remedy widespread small violations (such as imposing hidden fees). In some contexts — such as nursing homes that mistreat or neglect their vulnerable patients — that removes any incentive for lawyers to accept cases even to avert horrendous harms.

Criminal prosecution is the sharp end of the state, its most coercive process short of war. Lawyers have long been aware that having a good lawyer who can afford to challenge the state’s evidence and sway a jury confers significant advantages on a criminal defendant. So important was the right to counsel considered that it was enshrined in the early constitutions. Yet the great majority of defendants are indigent. They cannot buy an adequate defense on the market. Nineteenth-century courts gave some recognition to the problem by appointing counsel in serious felony cases, especially capital cases. Some of the law reform-minded bar groups formed in the Progressive Era (not the ABA) began to recognize the problem. There followed a long history of reports and initiatives to try to solve it.

A new urgency to fund criminal defense came from Supreme Court decisions requiring states to provide for indigent defense of federal felony defendants (1938), state felony defendants (1963), and, finally, all accused facing loss of liberty (1972). States responded variously: Some expanded existing public defender offices, others (like most states of the Old Confederacy) assigned counsel — often the dregs of the bar — to represent accused persons, but paid so little (like $500 for a capital case) that all any counsel could hope to get for her client was a hastily negotiated guilty plea. Meanwhile, the wars on crime and on drugs, following a spike in violent crime peaking around 1990, effectively transferred charging and sentencing discretion from judges to prosecutors, reducing even further defense counsel’s only leverage — the credible threat to take a case to trial — in plea negotiations. Now, 55 years after Gideon v. Wainwright , criminal defense remains in a state of crisis. 30 Despite many publicized exonerations of defendants in capital cases wrongly convicted by the state’s misconduct or mistakes, funding for criminal defense has little popular support — in part because most defendants are black or brown — and almost no effective political lobby, though by now the organized bar has taken up its cause.

Contrast England and Wales. After World War II, under pressure to reduce enormous class disparities among a people who had shared equally in wartime sacrifice, the government resolved to try to make the common-law courts, which had been priced far out of the range of most citizens, more accessible. (The prewar and wartime governments tried to compensate by funding Citizens Advice Bureaus that dispensed informal advice to people with legal, or potentially legal, problems. These still exist: there is no law in England giving the profession the monopoly over advice-giving.) The route chosen was a form of judicare: Parliament provided a generous system of state support for solicitors and barristers to represent the indigent. By the 1960s, barristers were receiving over half their collective income from legal-aid cases.

A series of governments, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative one and followed by conservative and neoliberal ones, decided this scheme was too costly and wasteful, and have gradually dismantled it in favor of central state control over lawyers’ costs and outsourcing to nonprofit providers of more “holistic” services that favor mediation and conciliation over adversarialism in family cases. Personal-injury cases are now, as in the United States, financed by contingent fees. Since 2000, control over providers has been tightened further, subordinating clients’ welfare and rights entirely to budgetary concerns, abandoning audits of quality, and leaving to providers how to deal with exploding caseloads. 31 The legal profession’s responses to these changes have been mixed. Initially, they were outraged by some of the reforms targeting their traditional privileges, like barristers’ monopoly of rights of audience in courts, and solicitors’ monopoly of conveyancing practices. 32 More recently, however, lawyers and judges have rallied to protest cuts in legal services budgets and to try to protect rule-of-law values in a system of administrative controls.

The highest barriers to access to the legal system are its complexity and costs. 33 Complexity calls for personnel with the training to deal with it, and their time and that of the other experts who support their work — forensic accountants, scientific and medical experts, and the like — is expensive. Some blame the complexity of law on lawyers themselves, and there is probably some truth to that charge. But the most likely cause is that a pluralist, fragmented political system like the United States’ proliferates multiple and conflicting laws, and interpretations of those laws, to satisfy the demands of interest groups. Legal procedures are distended to meet the capacities and budgets of their highest-end users: business corporations. 34 The adversary system adds extra expense because investigating facts is left to the parties, their lawyers, and their hired experts rather than to a neutral magistrate as in Europe. Litigation seems not to have been expensive in the 19th century, but became much more so in the 20th, even though actual trials have almost vanished in civil and criminal cases.

Cost and complexity naturally give rise to counterpressures to reduce both. Some well-known studies of litigation rates over time show that with industrialization, they rise sharply, but then start to decline. The reason suggested is that many areas traditionally handled in courts become routinized in administrative procedures, or shunted off to more informal dispute-settlement. 35

There are several examples within the American judicial system:

Compensation for employee injuries beginning around 1910 were shifted out of the tort system into administrative workers’ compensation systems. (Lawyers were at first excluded from the claims system, but forced themselves, and then were allowed, back in.)

Claims for auto accident compensation were, early in the 20th century, largely relegated to insurance agency adjusters, who determined the merit and value of claims, with the courts as a backstop for unsettled cases. 36 Minor “soft-tissue” injuries from accidents are increasingly the province of settlement mills, which send demands for compensation to insurance companies, take a cut of the proceeds, and never try cases. 37

The veterans benefits claim system from the Civil War to 1988 excluded lawyers by providing they could be paid no more than $10 per case. 38

Divorce has been mostly delegalized, taken out of the court system by no-fault divorce, and self-help form-filling in uncontested cases. Many divorce lawyers’ offices now offer mediation services to clients. 39

More ominously, as mentioned above, many tort and contract claims that might otherwise be heard in courts have been relegated to arbitration by mandatory arbitration clauses in most consumer and employee contracts.

Federal immigration rules permit certain kinds of nonlawyer advisors to act for immigrants. 40

Another project of the organized bar that has obstructed access to justice, broadly conceived, has been its sustained efforts to maintain its monopoly over advice-giving that has any legal component. Throughout the 20th century, using statutes prohibiting the “unauthorized practice of law,” the bar has fought turf wars with many competitors, some won and some lost. 41 The bar ceded most tax preparation work to accountants, and real-estate closings in many states to title companies and realtors. It is currently challenging firms like LegalZoom and RocketLawyer, which supply mostly standardized legal services for relatively routine transactions.

Many current proposals are in the air to relax unauthorized practice rules to allow paraprofessionals who have gone through a short training and certification program to help clients navigate disputes and adverse government actions. Segments of the organized bar, although still mounting phalanxes of resistance, have begun to perceive the inutility and bad public relations of resisting nonlawyer involvement in markets its monopoly does not serve. There are many areas of practice in which specialized paraprofessional providers could give better service than barely competent generalist graduates of law schools (immigration law is a prime example).

An ABA Commission on Nonlawyer Practice recommended in 1995 that unauthorized-practice rules be relaxed to permit the licensing of paraprofessionals. 42 The ABA ignored the report. In 2012, the Supreme Court of Washington State agreed to license paralegals, but, as of 2018, they were limited to 28 paralegals in family practice, regulated by the state bar, and not allowed to appear in court; and they face hostility from family lawyers. 43 In general, it is unrealistic to expect bar associations, representing a profession facing high levels of unemployment among recent law graduates, to go very far to welcome competing providers.

In the profession’s long history, leading lawyers and judges have recognized and sporadically acted on the profession’s public obligations to open paths to legal services for relatively poor people. They have frequently acknowledged that the ideal of the rule of law requires universal access to justice. The profession’s ideals have inspired some of its exceptional members to devote their careers to serving and promoting service to poor or unpopular clienteles. Those ideals and their heroic exemplars still lead students to apply to law schools and, once in practice, to seek out occasions for pro bono work or charitable or government service.

But most lawyers, most of the time, are concerned with making a profitable living, and not much interested in supplying or financing legal services for others: They put their own interests first, then their clients’, and only as an afterthought, the public’s and nonpaying clienteles’. More disturbing, lawyers for powerful clients facing opposition from weaker adversaries have proved all too willing to subvert the ideals of equal access to law, under the pretext of economic efficiency, by denying a level playing field to lawyers for the other side. Remember, for example, the campaigns against the tort plaintiff’s bar and for mandatory arbitration clauses in employment and consumer contracts, and the attacks on law reform efforts of legal services and on fee awards supporting the public interest and civil rights bars. 44

Professional organizations such as bar associations have always had a dual character: They are official spokesmen for the public aspirations of the profession to serve the ideals of the rule of law and universal justice, and often sponsors of programs to make the ideals effective; but they are primarily guilds whose aim is to protect and expand monopoly domains for their members’ work, demand for their services, and their fees and profits. When those public aims and the guild’s interests conflict, the leaders and the rank-and-file of the bar tend, not surprisingly, to favor the guild’s. Initiatives to make justice more accessible have been more likely, when they come, to originate with those marginal to or outside of the profession.

European societies have long accepted the responsibilities of providing legal services, just as they provide health care, to people who cannot afford them as basic responsibilities of the state. 45 In the United States, the government underwrites over half of the cost of health care (through Medicare, Medicaid, and programs of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). But for legal services, we are still depending on direct client funding plus a stingy and hobbled federal program and a mishmash of volunteer and philanthropic efforts. That is no way to run a system that aspires to equal justice.

• If empirical support is needed for so obvious a proposition, see the classic study of the Chicago Bar: John P. Heinz, Robert L. Nelson, Rebecca L. Sandefur, and Edward O. Laumann, Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar (2005).
• James A. Brundage, Legal Aid for the Poor and the Professionalization of Law in the Middle Ages , 9 Am. J. Legal Hist. 171, 174 (1988).
• David J. Seipp, Legal Services for the Poor in the Early Common Law , in Law and Society in Later Medieval England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of Paul Brand (2018), discussing An Act to Admit Such Persons as Are Poor to Sue in Forma Pauperis, Statute 11 Hen. 7, chap. 12, reprinted in 2 Statutes of the Realm, 578 (1495).
• See Christopher W. Brooks, Litigation and Society in England , 1200–1996, in Lawyers, Litigation and English Society Since 1450 63, 94–95 (1998).
• For the pioneering role of the women’s societies, see Felice Batlan, Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945 (2015).
• Reginald Heber Smith, Justice and the Poor: A Study of the Present Denial of Justice to the Poor and of the Agencies Making More Equal Their Position Before the Law with Particular Reference to Legal Aid Work in the United States(1919).
• See Earl Johnson Jr., To Establish Justice for All: The Past and Future of Civil Legal Aid in the United States, Vol. 1 3–43 (2014).
• The restrictions on LSC-funded lawyers are summarized at Legal Services Corporation, About Statutory Restrictions on LSC-Funded Programs , https://www.lsc.gov/about-statutory-restrictions-LSC-funded-programs . For more information on their effects, see Brennan Ctr. for Justice, Restricting Legal Services: How Congress Left the Poor with Only Half a Lawyer (2000).
• The definitive history of OEO-LSP and LSC is by one of the program’s early directors, Earl Johnson Jr., in his book To Establish Justice for All .
• See Scott Cummings, The Politics of Pro Bono , 52 UCLA L. Rev. 116–23 (2004).
• Deborah L. Rhode, Access to Justice 148–51 (2004).
• Id. at 154–55.
• Jerald Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America(1976).
• Bates v. State Bar of Arizona , 433 U.S. 350 (1977); and Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar , 446 U.S. 447 (1978).
• John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (2009) (chapter 4).
• See, e.g. , Walter K. Olson, The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit(1991); Walter K. Olson, The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law (2003); Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America(1994).
• See, e.g. , John C. Coffee Jr., Class Wars: The Dilemma of the Mass Tort Class Action , 95 Colum. L. Rev. 1343 (1995).
• See, e.g. , Marc Galanter, Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don’t Know (and Think We Know) about our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society , 31 UCLA L. Rev. 4 (1983).
• See Stephen Daniels and Joanne Martin, Evidence on the Link Between Damage Caps and Access to the Civil Justice System , 55 Depaul L. Rev. 635 (2006).
• Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), 28 U.S.C § 1332(d).
• Richard L. Abel, The Real Tort Crisis — Too Few Claims , 48 Ohio St. L.J. 443 (1987).
• See Deborah R. Hensler, Mary E. Vaiana, James S. Kakalik, and Mark A. Peterson, Trends in Tort Litigation: The Story Behind the Statistics 29 (1987) (Table 4.1).
• Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct§ 5.4.
• See Mark Tushnet, The Rights Revolution in the Twentieth Century , in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. 3, 377–402 (2008).
• See, for example, the Virginia antisolicitation statute invalidated in NAACP v. Button , 371 U.S. 415 (1963).
• In Re Primus , 436 U.S. 412 (1978).
• Pamela S. Karlan, Disarming the Private Attorney General , 2003 U. Ill. L. Rev. 183.
• See Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang, Retrenching Civil Rights Litigation: Why the Court Succeeded Where Congress Failed , in The Rights Revolution Revisited: Institutional Perspectives on the Private Enforcement of Civil Rights in the U.S. 197—223 (Lynda G. Dodd ed., 2018).
• AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion , 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011); American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant , 133 S. Ct. 2304 (2013); and Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 138 S. Ct. 1612 (2018)
• Stephen B. Bright and Sia M. Sanneh, Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance after Gideon v. Wainwright, 122 Yale L.J. 2150 (2013).
• See Hilary Sommerlad, Some Reflections on the Relationship between Citizenship, Access to Justice, and the Reform of Legal Aid , 31 J. Law & Society 345 (2004).
• Richard L. Abel, English Lawyers between Market and State: The Politics of Professionalism (2004).
• The most comprehensive analysis of legal complexity and costs and their causes is Gillian K. Hadfield, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (2016) (chapter 7).
• See Robert A. Kagan, Do Lawyers Cause Adversarial Legalism? A Preliminary Inquiry , 19 Law & Social Inquiry 1 (1994).
• See Lawrence M. Friedman, Access to Justice: Social and Historical Context , in Access to Justice: Promising Institutions, Vol. 2 (Mauro Cappelletti and John Weisner eds., 1978).
• H. Laurence Ross, Settled Out of Court: The Social Process of Insurance Claims Adjustment(1970).
• Nora Freeman Engstrom, Sunlight and Settlement Mills , 86 NYU L. Rev. 805 (2011).
• Codified as 38 U.S.C § 3404(c)(2).
• Rhode, supra note 11, at 81–82.
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Representation before USCIS , in Adjudicator’s Field Manual (2012), available at https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/policy-manual-afm/afm12-external.pdf (revised Apr. 23, 2012).
• Deborah L. Rhode, Policing the Professional Monopoly: A Constitutional and Empirical Analysis of Unauthorized Practice Prohibitions , 14 Stan. L. Rev. 1 (1981); and Richard L. Abel, American Lawyers112–126 (1989).
• ABA Commission on Nonlawyer Practice, Nonlawyer Activity in Law-Related Situations (1995), https://www.paralegals.org/files/ABA_Commission_on_Non-Lawyer_Practice.pdf.
• Washington State Bar Association, Limited License Legal Technicians , available at https://www.wsba.org/for-legal-professionals/join-the-legal-profession-in-wa/limited-license-legal-technicians ; and Nicole Shilling, Loosening a Legal Monopoly: Perspectives from Paraprofessional Pioneers (unpublished interview study of Washington LLLTs).
• For a catalog of several such efforts, see David Luban, Taking Out the Adversary: The Assault on Progressive Public-Interest Lawyers , 91 Cal. L. Rev. 209 (2003).
• See Richard L. Abel, Law without Politics: Legal Aid Under Advanced Capitalism , 32 UCLA L. Rev. 474, 492–94 (1985).

Also In This Edition

• A bridge too far? An expert panel examines the promise and peril of third-party litigation financing
• Boxed In: Does the Prospect of Re-Selection Influence Judicial Decision Making?
• She Lifted Her Voice: Constance Baker Motley (1921–2005) U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
• The Cars of the Future are Headed to Your Courtroom
• Judicial Honors Fall 2019
• Emails to a Federal Judge
• Shattering Glass Ceilings from the Bench
• Finding Humanity in the Great Power Competition for Artificial Intelligence
• Fixing Fees, Fines & Bail: Toward a Fairer System of Justice
• Stevens, J., Dissenting: The Legacy of Heller
• To Pay or Not To Pay?

About Robert W. Gordon

Robert W. Gordon is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the Chancellor Kent Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. He is the author of Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law (2017) and editor of Law, Society, and History: Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman (with Morton J. Horowitz, 2011) and The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1992).

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Justice as a Virtue

The notion of justice as a virtue began in reference to a trait of individuals, and to some extent remains so, even if today we often conceive the justice of individuals as having some (grounding) reference to social justice. But from the start, the focus on justice as a virtue faced pressures to diffuse, in two different ways.

First, “justice as a virtue” is ambiguous as between individual and social applications. Rawls and others regard justice as “the first virtue of social institutions” (1971, p. 3), but Rawls is not the first to think of justice as a virtue of social institutions or societies — Plato was there long before him. However, justice as a virtue of societies, polities, and their institutions is addressed elsewhere , so the focus in this essay will be on justice as a virtue in individuals. That said, individuals typically live as members of political communities, so the societal dimension of justice as a virtue will never be long out of view (Woodruff 2018).

Second, from the start the effort to analyze the virtue of justice has led to attempts to formalize the requirements (or norms) of justice, and at times the latter project has threatened to swallow the first in ways that make thinking of a virtue of justice gratuitous or otiose. We might be tempted to think that the virtue of justice consists simply in compliance with the norms of justice our theory specifies: a just person will be one who complies with the norms of justice, whether those are narrowly interpersonal or more broadly social or political in scope. In this way the virtue becomes subsidiary to norms of justice independently specified (Anderson 2010, p. 2; LeBar 2014). Doing so threatens to lose the force that the notion of virtue had in the earliest thinking about justice.

A further complication is that even the idea of justice as a virtue of individuals seems ambiguous in regard to scope. Plato in the Republic treats justice as an overarching virtue of both individuals and societies, so that almost every issue he (or we) would regard as ethical comes in under the notion of justice. But in later usages justice covers only part of individual morality, and we don’t readily think of someone as unjust if they lie or neglect their children — other epithets more readily spring to mind. Individual justice first and most readily regards moral issues having to do with distributions of goods or property. It is, we say, unjust for someone to steal from people or not to give them what he owes them, and it is also unjust if someone called upon to distribute something good (or bad or both) among members of a group uses an arbitrary or unjustified basis for making the distribution. Discussion of justice as an individual virtue often centers on questions, therefore, about property and other distributable goods, though the broader sense broached by Plato never entirely disappears. Still there is disagreement over whether the broader distributive questions associated with political morality have subordinated or obscured the earlier Greek concerns with justice as a virtue of individual character (Hursthouse 1999, pp. 5–6; Coope 2007; Lu 2017).

1.1 Ancient

1.2 medieval and modern, 2. social psychology and justice, 3. justice as a virtue of societies.

• 4. Justice and other Virtues

5. Recent Developments

6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Philosophical discussion of justice begins with Plato, who treats the topic in a variety of dialogues, most substantially in Republic . There Plato offers the first sustained discussion of the nature of justice ( dikaiosune ) and its relation to happiness, as a departure from three alternatives receiving varying degrees of attention. First, there is a traditionalist conception of justice (speaking the truth and paying your debts). Second, Plato has Socrates rebut the Sophist conception of justice which built on a distinction between nature ( phusis ) and convention ( nomos ) As Plato has this conception articulated by Thrasymachus in Book I, justice is simply the “advantage of the stronger,” not tracking anything like the sort of value attributed to it by traditionalists. Finally, Plato has Socrates confront a conventionalist conception of justice that anticipates modern contractarian views, in which justice — forbearing preying on others in exchange for not being preyed on by them — is a “second-best alternative,” not as good as being able to prey at will upon others, but better than being the prey of others. These last two challenges give rise to the central question of the book: to whose advantage is justice? Would we really be better off being unjust if we could get away with it? Plato’s negative answer to that question is the project of the balance of the work.

Plato’s method involves the provocative idea that justice in the city ( polis ) is the same thing as justice in the individual, just “writ large.” There are good reasons to worry about that assumption (Williams 1973; Keyt 2006). But in Plato’s sociology of the city, there are three classes engaged in a kind of division of labor. There is a guardian class which rules, a class of “auxiliaries” that provide the force behind the ruling, and the class of merchants that produce to satisfy the needs and desires of the city. Similarly, the psyche of the individual has three parts: a reasoning part to rule, a “spirited” part to support the rule of reason, and an appetitive part. Plato finds justice in the city to consist in each part “having and doing its own,” and since the smaller is just like the larger, justice in the individual consists in each part of the psyche doing its own work. (This grounds the idea, later enshrined by Justinian, that justice is “giving every man his due;” Justinian I.i). Further, Plato argues, justice is a master virtue in a sense, because in both the city and the psyche, if each part is doing its own job, both city and psyche will also have wisdom, courage, and moderation or self-discipline. This conception of justice sustains the contrast with the conventionalist view advocated by the Sophists. On the other hand, at least initially it leaves it an open question whether the just individual refrains from such socially proscribed actions as lying, killing, and stealing. Plato eventually seeks to show that someone with a healthy, harmonious soul wouldn’t lie, kill, or steal, but it is not clear that argument succeeds, nor, if it does, that that is the right understanding of why we ought not to lie, kill, or steal (Sachs 1963; LeBar 2013, ch. XII).

Plato gives a somewhat different treatment of justice in Crito , in which Socrates’ eponymous friend attempts to persuade Socrates to accept his (Crito’s) offer to bribe a way out of the death sentence Socrates is waiting to have executed. Here Plato’s arguments first associate the just life with the good life, thus the life Socrates has most reason to live. And justice, he then argues, requires not only not inflicting wrong or injury on others, even in response to wrongs from them, but fulfilling one’s agreements, and — in particular — abiding by one’s (tacit or explicit) agreement to abide by the laws of the city unless one can persuade it to change them. Of course, justice cannot require one to abide by laws that require one to act unjustly, as Socrates’ own case (as characterized in Apology ) shows (Kraut 1984).

It is worth noting (as Johnston 2011 observes) that even if Plato’s is the first philosophical discussion of justice, a concern with what an individual is due as a matter of justice is a driving issue in Homer’s Iliad , though there is no counterpart concern there with justice as a property of a society or tribe. So even Plato’s philosophical concerns are building on well-established questions about what justice requires of us in our treatment of one another.

Aristotle does not see the virtue of justice in quite the comprehensive sense Plato does; he treats it as a virtue of character (in the entirety of one of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics , also common to the Eudemian Ethics ), and as a virtue of constitutions and political arrangements (in Politics ). The question naturally arises as to the relation between these forms of justice. Aristotle seems to think they are closely related, without being synonymous applications of the same concept. As the latter is a conception of political justice, we will focus here on the former. Justice as a personal virtue follows Aristotle’s model for virtues of character, in which the virtue lies as an intermediate or mean between vices of excess and defect ( Nicomachean Ethics V). While he grants that there is a “general” sense of justice in which justice is coincident with complete virtue, there is a “particular” sense in which it is concerned with not overreaching ( pleonexia ). It is not clear, however, exactly how Aristotle understands this arrangement, or the nature of the vices of excess and defect which this “particular” justice is to counteract. One very plausible reading has it that justice is opposed to a desire for maldistribution of “goods of fortune” such as money, fame, or honor (Williams 1980; Curzer 1995). On another it is opposed to an insufficient attention to others’ rights (Foot 1988, p. 9). On still another it focuses on the goods of others, or common goods (O’Connor 1988; Miller 1995).

These issues remain open in part because Aristotle seems most interested in establishing a conception of the formal structure of “particular” justice, which seems to reflect a conception of desert. He distinguishes between justice in distribution and justice in rectification. The former, he claims, adheres to a kind of proportionality, in which what each deserves is proportional to the relationship between the contributions. If A contributes twice as much as B (of whatever the metric of merit is relevant in some particular case), then A’s return ought also to be twice B’s. This conception of distributive justice obviously lends itself to “goods of fortune” — and to some goods, like wealth, more obviously than others — but it need not in principle be confined to such goods, although the examples Aristotle provides suggest such applications. Similarly, justice in rectification involves a sort of “arithmetical proportion.” If C defrauds D by amount X, then justice requires depriving C of X and restoring X to D, as a matter of reestablishing a kind of equality between them. These structural devices are elegant and attractive, but they leave open a number of questions (LeBar, forthcoming). First, as indicated, to what are we to suppose they apply? Second, in what way do they figure into the nature of the person who is just in the particular sense? (That is, how are they related to justice as a virtue?) Does a model of particular justice as a virtue fit the general model of virtue as a mean, and if so, what sort of mean is it? Aristotle seems torn between a conception of justice as a virtue in his distinctive understanding of what a virtue is — with a requirement that one have all the virtues to have any ( Nicomachean Ethics VI.13), and rooted in the doctrine of the mean — and justice as having the form of a formal normative structure, to which the virtue threatens to become subsidiary. All this is to leave aside questions of the relation between this “particular” sense of justice and political justice, and the role of the virtue of justice in the individual as it contributes to justice in the polis.

Epicurus’ conception of the role of justice was more central to his eudaimonism perhaps than its counterpart in Plato and Aristotle, but that reflects in part his distinctive understanding of eudaimonia , or happiness. For Epicurus this consisted in ataraxia — tranquility, or freedom from disturbance. Given that the good life is the life without disturbance, justice plays a key instrumental role. One might, Epicurus thinks, withdraw entirely from human society to avoid disturbance, but the alternative is to live socially under terms which secure the avoidance of disturbance. This is the structure of the ideal Epicurean community, in which each forbears aggression (Armstrong 1997, Thrasher 2013). Justice is a matter of keeping agreements generally, and in particular the agreement not to harm or transgress social norms.

In this way Epicurus offers a conception of the virtue of justice that harmonizes both its personal and its political dimensions. The personal virtue consists in the motivation to abide by a contract not to aggress or harm others. The political virtue inheres in a polity in which such norms regulate the conduct of its citizens, and these two dimensions of justice as a virtue reinforce each other.

The other great ethical tradition of antiquity (Stoicism) had remarkably little to say about justice (Annas 1993, p. 311), so we pass on to the medieval and modern periods.

The legacy of the ancients — Aristotle in particular — continued into the medieval period, notably in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who appropriated much of Aristotle’s philosophy while setting it into a Christian theological framework. As in Aristotle, virtue and virtues are prominent parts of his ethical theory. And, like Aristotle justice is an important virtue, though for Aquinas it less important than the virtue of charity, a Christian virtue that did not appear among the virtues recognized by Aristotle. There are other elements of his account that situate it in an interesting way in the transition from ancient eudaimonist accounts of virtue, to virtue as it appears in the modern era, before it recedes from prominence in ethical theory.

But to the extent Christian writers allied themselves with Plato and Aristotle, they were downplaying another central element in Christian thought and morality, the emphasis on agapic love. Such love seems to be a matter of motivationally active feeling rather than of being rational, and some writers on morality (eventually) allowed this side of Christianity to have a major influence on what they had to say about virtue.

Significant elements of the Aristotelian account of justice reappear in Aquinas’. First, justice is first and foremost a virtue of character rather than institutions, although Aquinas draws a distinction among such virtues not found in Aristotle. For Aquinas, justice as a virtue is a matter of perfection of the will, rather than the passions (ST II-II 58.4). Aquinas offers no account of justice as a virtue of societies or institutions, though he interprets the “general” sense of justice he borrows from Aristotle as being a matter of individual willing and action for the common good. “Particular” justice, which as in Aristotle’s account is most of his focus, has to do with relationships -- in particular but not limited to exchange -- between individuals as individuals (ST II-II 58.8).

Second, Aquinas grounds the norms for these exchanges in the ancient formula of Justinian, which hearkens back to Plato: justice is giving each his own. But his interpretation of this formula situates him astride a deep but subtle divide between ancient and modern thought. To some extent this effect is an upshot of his inheriting not only the Greek eudaimonist tradition, but also a Roman jurisprudential tradition in which notions like standing and right as claim (rather than, say, fairness) had begun to emerge (Porter 2016, p. 143). As a result, Aquinas’ synergistic account has some novel complications.

One major complication, relative to the ancient accounts, is that what is ours by right is a recognition of a kind of status, as an effect of the order among people ordained by God ( ST I-II 100.8). As Jean Porter points out, this establishes a normative standard for justice that does not grow out of the agent’s own perfection or eudaimonia (Porter 2016, p. 157). There are two significant follow-on implications.

First, the fabric of the eudaimonist approach to practical reasoning and life — inherited from the Greeks — begins to fray. For better or worse, on the Greek eudaimonist views (including here Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus) our reasons for action arise from our interest in a happy life. If the reason-giving nature of others arises from a different source, as this reading of Aquinas suggests, then practical reason seems to have a duality of ultimate sources, with the complications that kind of duality brings.

Second, this is the first step in the diminution of the theoretical significance of the virtues — a process that will not begin to be reversed until the middle of the 20th century. On Aristotle’s view, for example, the virtuous person sees reasons for acting that the non-virtuous do not (and that arguably are not there to be seen absent the effects of virtue — LeBar 2013; Berryman 2019). Virtue is no longer the normative epicenter of the theory, as it was for the Greeks. To the extent that this aspect of Aquinas’s view has virtue responsive to value or reasons that is accounted for in some way other than the work of virtue, it is the leading edge of process that will result in a much-reduced role for virtue in later ethical accounts

Hume is an excellent exemplar of this point, in both the Treatise and the Enquiries . Virtue, Hume maintains, is a matter of “some quality or character,” produced in one by “durable principles of the mind” ( T III.iii.I, p. 575). We deem such qualities virtues not, as on the ancient Greek view, because they conduce to the happiness of the person who has them, but because they have a “tendency to the good of mankind” or society. ( T III.iii.I). This service renders them pleasing to our “moral tastes:” our approbation, Hume tells us, has its source in “view of a character, which is naturally fitted to be useful to others, or to the person himself, or which is agreeable to others, or to the person himself” ( T III.iii.I, 591). We can think of that as the criterion some quality of character must have to be deemed a virtue. In consequence, what counts as virtuous is an upshot of, and not the source of, the normative foundations of this view.

By Hume’s time the content of justice as a virtue has shifted as well. In Hume’s treatment, the focus of justice is property — relations of “mine and thine.” It is a “cautious, jealous” virtue in the sense that it is focused on the sorts of exclusionary powers that are characteristic of property rules and relations. We may always be aspiring for more but justice aims at the preservation and security of what one has already ( E III.1, p. 184). So the virtue of justice, as Hume thinks of it, will in the main consist of a quality in one which disposes one to observe and uphold these rules.

What Hume wants to show is, first, that we can have such a disposition or quality (that is, that it is possible for us to have a quality or character to observe the rules of justice), and, second, that such a quality would count as a virtue, given his criteria. His approach to these questions in the Treatise is framed by a problem he has set up himself. To appreciate that problem, we have to step back to Hume’s broader view about moral motivation. Hume had argued that moral principles “are not conclusions of our reason” ( T III.i.I); instead, they are “more properly felt than judg’d of” ( T III.i.II). Morality, and virtue, is a matter of sentiments or passions. Why? Hume marshals a number of arguments to this effect which are not relevant to our purposes. The basic reason is that the functional roles of reason and the passions are markedly different, in Hume’s view. The task of reason is to discover truth or falsehood, in “relations of ideas” or “matters of facts” ( T III.i.I); as such, it utterly lacks the capacity to move us to action. Only the passions can do that ( T II.iii.III). The passions, on the other hand, have no representational content whatsoever; they are “original existences” ( T II.iii.III; III.i.I). Virtue is paradigmatically a practical matter: it is a property of what we do, and to act we must be motivated. That means any successful account of virtue must find it in our passions, not in any aspect of our reason ( T III.i.I). So far so good.

However, when we come to justice, we look in vain for a passion that can supply motive power for us to act justly. If anything, our natural motives move us away from justice ( T III.ii.II). Self-love requires “correcting and restraining” ( T III.ii.I). And only a passion can do that. But which? Hume himself dismisses the possibilities of public or private beneficence or universal love. In the end he concludes that there is no natural passion to explain it. Instead, it is in a certain crucial sense artificial ( T III.ii.VI). Under certain conditions, given that we are sensible of the advantages of living in human society, our self-love or self-interest may be given an “alteration of its direction,” and induce us to respect the rules of justice. These Hume thinks of primarily as involving honesty and “particular” property rules ( T III.ii.II). That “alteration” needs explanation.

Two facts about the conditions in which we act — one about us, one about our environment — set this alteration in motion. First, Hume maintains, we are limited in our generosity or benevolence. And second, we live in conditions of scarcity ( T III.ii.II). We have to work to make a go of it, and we cannot count on others to do so for us. We need control of our world to meet our needs, but we are vulnerable to the selfishness and predation of others.

The solution, Hume argues, is that we naturally fall into a “convention” by which we observe that rules of property — the observance of which is key to the virtue of justice — is good for all of us. This convention is no formal agreement; Hume argues that it cannot be something like the product of promise or compact ( T III.ii.II). Instead, “it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it” ( T III.ii.II, p. 490). Much as two men pulling the oars in a boat together need no explicit agreement to find they prosper by such an arrangement, so do we generally. (Wilson 2018 explores support for Hume’s hypothesis through work in experimental economics.) So in the end it is self-interest that drives us to comply with the requirements of justice, though Hume adds that sympathy with the public interest induces our endorsement of it once justice has become established. This endorsement, however, is reserved for a scheme of property rules taken generally; as Hume observes, individual instances of compliance may frequently be “contrary to public interest,” though such compliance is still required of us. Hume believes the benefit of the system overall, both to society and to individual, requires that rules not admit of exceptions ( T III.ii.II, E Appendix III, §256). Self-interest accounts for the possibility of our being motivated to act as the virtue of justice requires, and both the utility and the agreeableness, both to ourselves and others, of a resulting social order with respected property rules, leads to our approbation of that motivation as a virtue.

In fact, this point — that “public utility is the sole origin of justice” — is the point of Hume’s discussion of justice in the Enquiries (III.I, ¶145). Scarcity imposes a need for us to distinguish mine from thine, and we have not sufficient generosity in our natures to do without property rules (as we might, say, in our families). And once again Hume argues that our recognition of the utility and necessity of justice provides “entire command over our sentiments” ( E III.II, ¶163).As David Johnston observes (Johnston 2011, p. 138), Hume’s understanding of the value of justice as instrumental in the promotion of utility marks a sharp shift from earlier understandings which invoked various forms of reciprocity in understanding that value.

Such a sentimentalist account of justice is also found in Adam Smith; in fact, a focus on the sentiments almost completely swamps concern for virtue. Our judgments of virtue and vice, he says, are compounded by consideration of two different “relations” in a sentiment: “the cause or object which excites or causes it, and … the end which it proposes” (TMS II.i.introduction). His focus on those two “relations” obviates any independent discussion of virtue per se. He does however explicitly countenance a virtue of justice, developed in contrast with the virtue of beneficence. In Smith, even more clearly than in Hume, one can see that this virtue consists in conformity to “rules” or “laws” of justice that appear to exist antecedently to the realization of the virtue itself, unlike ancient accounts. Smith indicates that justice merits resentment when absent, that it may be “extorted by force,” and that in the main it requires forbearing from harming others.. Smith calls justice a “negative virtue” in this respect: often all it requires is that we sit still and do nothing (Smith 1759, II.ii.I.5, 9). It is essential to the subsistence of society, Smith tells us (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.3-4), but — in contrast to Hume — is not reducible in its motivational basis to regard for society. Instead, our just concern for “multitudes” is compounded of our concern for individuals, which arises from “fellow-feeling,” which is yet short of “love, esteem, and affection” (Smith 1759, II.ii.3.7).

In Kant, finally, along with a movement away from sentimentalism we see the completion of the distinction between justice as a virtue and justice as a norm to which a virtue may or may not correspond. While Kant has a theory (or “doctrine”) of virtue, he distinguishes that theory precisely against a counterpoised theory of justice. The two are complementary elements in the “metaphysics of morals.” Moreover, the doctrine of justice itself has two parts, roughly corresponding to the distinction present since Plato’s work, between the role of justice in the individual and the role of justice in the state. Kant calls these “private right” and “public right,” respectively. But right in either case is not how Kant at least conceives of virtue; instead, right is a “condition” that can obtain between the moral agents comprising a moral or legal community, in virtue of their principles of choice in acting (Kant 1797). Little remains here of the notion of justice as a virtue of individuals as it began with the ancient Greeks.

20th-century developmental psychology drew deeply on the Kantian legacy. Piaget (1932/1948) treated moral development as principally involving increasing cognitive sophistication. More particularly, Piaget saw that sophistication as a matter of taking more and more general or universal views of moral issues, and endorsed the Kantian and rationalist idea that morality rests on and can be justified in terms of considerations of justice. Piaget saw a “law of evolution” in moral development, from an understanding of rules (including moral rules) as being “heteronomous” impositions of authority, to which one is objectively responsible, to a grounding in mutual respect, accompanied by subjective responsibility to others (Piaget 1932/1948, p. 225). This transition is fostered through social interaction, and attention to norms of equality and reciprocity replace those of mere obedience.

Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to propose a conception of moral development that postulated six stages of human moral development. In his earliest work, Kohlberg identified the highest stage of such development with a concern for justice and human rights based on universal principles. Concern for relationships and for individual human well-being was embedded in a framework of conformity to social norms, at lower stages of the process. Moreover, he saw the ordering of the different stages in Piagetian fashion as basically reflecting differences in rational understanding: those whose moral thinking involved the invoking of universal principles of justice and rights were thought to show a more advanced cognitive development than those whose moral thought appeals primarily to the importance of relationships and of human well-being or suffering. The paradigm of moral development involves judgments that are “reversible,” in the sense that each party to the issue can accept the correct judgment by reversing his or her perspective and taking up the viewpoint of the other (Kohlberg 1981). The sophisticated moral reasoner will engage in a process of “moral musical chairs,” taking up the positions of the parties to the conflict successively. It is, on this version of Kohlberg’s thought, that formal feature of the deliberative process that is characteristic of greatest moral development. As his research and thought progressed, however, Kohlberg increasingly acknowledged that these formal features were less characteristic of overall moral development and thought than of the deployment of specifically justice-based concepts. In fact, Kohlberg was impressed by the work of Rawls, and thought that the nature of Rawls’ “original position of equality” exemplified the kind of reversibility that is paradigmatic of the highest form of moral thought (Kohlberg 1981, p. 204). However, his approach treats utilitarianism as less cognitively advanced (more primitive) than rationalist views like Kant’s, and utilitarians (like R.M. Hare) naturally called into question the objectivity and intellectual fairness of Kohlberg’s account.

More significantly, perhaps, the evidence for Kohlberg’s stage sequence was drawn from studies of boys, and when one applies the sequence to the study of young girls, it turns out that girls on average end up at a less advanced stage of moral development than boys do. In her 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Carol Gilligan responded to Kohlberg’s views by questioning whether a theory of moral development based solely on a sample of males could reasonably be used to draw conclusions about the inferior moral development of women. Gilligan argued that her own studies of women’s development indicated that the moral development of girls and women proceeds and ends in a different fashion from that of boys and men, but that that proves nothing about inferiority or superiority: it is merely a fact of difference. In particular, Gilligan claimed that women tend to think morally in terms of connection to others (relationships) and in terms of caring about (responsibility for) those with whom they are connected; men, by contrast and in line with Kohlberg’s studies, tend to think more in terms of general principles of justice and of individual rights against (or individual autonomy from) other people. But Jean Hampton, among others, responded that Gilligan’s critique was itself a distortion, and that concerns for justice and individual rights are as significant for and in the moral lives of women as for men (Hampton 1993).

In recent years, a variety of social sciences have intensified investigation into aspects of our natures that are plausibly important for a virtue of justice. For example, Widlok 2018 surveys cross-cultural anthropological work examining the development of “ethical skill” in rightful and just sharing practices.

For a variety of reasons, many ethical thinkers have thought that justice cannot be based in sentiment but requires a more intellectually constructive rational(ist) basis, and in recent times this view of the matter seems to have been held, most influentially, by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice . Rawls makes clear his belief in the inadequacy of benevolence or sympathetic human sentiment in formulating an adequate conception of social justice. He says in particular that sentiment leaves unanswered or indeterminate various important issues of justice that a good theory of justice ought to be able to resolve.

Rawls’s positive view of justice is concerned primarily with the justice of institutions or (what he calls) the “basic structure” of society: justice as an individual virtue is derivative from justice as a social virtue defined via certain principles of justice. The principles, famously, are derived from an “original position” in which (very roughly) rational contractors under a “veil of ignorance” decide how they wish to commit themselves to being governed in their actual lives. Rawls deliberately invokes Kantian rationalism (or anti-sentimentalism) in explaining the intellectual or theoretical motivation behind his construction, and the two principles of justice that he argues would be agreed upon under the contractual conditions he specifies represent a kind of egalitarian political liberalism. Roughly, those principles stress (equality of) basic liberties and opportunities for self-advancement over considerations of social welfare, and the distribution of opportunities and goods in society is then supposed to work to the advantage of all (especially the worst-off members of society). He also says that the idea of what people distributively deserve or merit is derivative from social justice rather than (as with Aristotle and/or much common-sense thinking) providing the basis for thinking about social justice.

According to Rawls, individual justice is theoretically derivative from social justice because the just individual is to be understood as someone with an effective or “regulative” desire to comply with the principles of justice. However, it is not merely social justice that Rawls understands in (predominantly) rationalist fashion. When he explains how individuals (within a just society) develop a sense and/or the virtue of justice, he invokes the work of Piaget. Rawls lays more stress than Piaget does on the role our affective nature (sympathy and the desire for self-mastery) plays in the acquisition of moral virtue. But, like Piaget, he stresses the need for a sufficiently general appreciation and rational understanding of social relations as the grounding basis of a sense of duty or of justice and he explicitly classifies his account of moral development as falling within the “rationalist tradition.”

4. Justice and Other Virtues

Few would doubt that justice is a virtue of character. But there are other moral virtues. How is justice related to them? Is it more important? Even in Republic , in which Plato makes justice a “master virtue” of sorts, there are other virtues (wisdom, courage, and self-discipline), and elsewhere (notably Gorgias ) Plato makes self-discipline ( sophrosune ) the “master virtue,” so it is not clear that justice has any sort of priority over these other virtues. Likewise, though the texts we have show Aristotle devoting more space to justice, it is not clear that the particular form of the virtue of justice has any sort of pre-eminence. On the other hand, Cicero claims that justice is the “crowning glory” of the virtues ( De Officiis I.7). If we take virtue of character to have the moral centrality the ancients (perhaps in contrast to the moderns), how much importance should we accord to justice among the virtues?

Aquinas cites Cicero as a target in developing a sophisticated view of the relationships among the virtues ( ST II-II 58.12). On Aquinas’ view, Cicero is half right, for Aquinas distinguishes between virtues as responsive to appetites of our animal nature (moral virtues) and as responsive to appetites of our intellect (virtues of the will). He takes it that justice is preeminent over the moral virtues because it inheres in the rational part of the soul, and because its object is more noble (the good of others, or the common good, rather than the individual good). On that point he can agree with Cicero. However, these virtues themselves are not as excellent as the theological virtues, of which the greatest is love (or charity -- caritas; ST II-II 23.6). There are several arguments for this claim but it is grounded in Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians, that love is the greatest among the virtues of faith and hope (1 Corinthians 13:13).

In recent decades there have been secular challenges to the primacy of justice among virtues. Recall that Carol Gilligan had argued for a “different voice” for women in coming to grips with moral problems. Instead of a rights-based understanding of morality that gave special consideration to the individual, women saw relationships between people as primary (Gilligan 1983, pp. 19, 29). Kohlberg had offered a thought experiment about a man (“Heinz”) tempted to steal a life-saving drug to save his sick wife (Kohlberg 1981, p. 12). Whereas boys are more likely to think of Heinz’ dilemma in terms of what is the right thing to do, girls, Gilligan argues, see the world as “a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another” (Gillian 1983, p. 30). Gilligan carefully frames this contrast as one between voices, not a matter of ranking of dispositions or virtues, but her work can and did provide a basis for making that sort of assessment between virtues, one on which (as in Aquinas’ case) love and care for others turns out to be more important than considerations of justice.

In some ways, Nel Nodding’s pioneering work in laying out an “ethic of care” takes such a step. Following Gilligan, she sees much ethical theory as missing a feminine voice, one which grounds moral concern for the concrete other in caring for them and their needs, and thus as relational rather than individualistic (Noddings 1983, 1999). Yet some caution is required before seeing her as taking up something like a Thomistic stance on the priority of love over justice. For one thing, to a significant degree she wants to emphasize the importance of the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general (or the reliance on universal principles) in thinking and acting morally. But that is an emphasis which animates some particularistic forms of virtue ethics, and does not distinguish justice from love or other virtues. Moreover, where she explicitly argues that care “‘picks up’ where justice leaves off” (Noddings 1999, p. 12), she is thinking of justice as a property of institutions (e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness), and institutional implementations of those theories, not a virtue of character. She is clearly concerned about the limits of “rights-talk,” but that at least historically has not been a prominent part in thinking about justice as a virtue of character. Thus she does not clearly take a side in this matter.

Like Noddings, Virginia Held frames much of the point of the ethics of care against a historical theoretical backdrop of attention to justice (Held 1995, 2004, 2006). To some extent, like Noddings, for Held the relevant notion of justice is not a virtue of character but a concern with fairness, equality, and individual rights, or perhaps more generally impartial universal principles (Held 2004, p. 144; 2006, p. 14). In fact, Held more clearly poses an ethics of care as an alternative to virtue ethics (Held 2004, 143; 2006, 14). This is for two reasons. First, virtue ethical theories focus on dispositions and traits of individuals, whereas an ethics of care focuses on relations between individuals. Second, an ethics of care sees people as partially constituted by their relations with others, as opposed to the individualism characteristic of virtue ethics. Held does not think an ethics of care can do without a concern for justice as a value, however (Held 1995, 129). More generally, she believes, caring provides a “wider network” within which concerns for justice and virtue (as well as utility) should be fitted (2004, 147; 2006, 72). Margaret McLaren (2001), on the other hand, responds on the basis of commonalities between care ethics and virtue ethics that care ethics actually is most attractive when situated as an ethics of virtue. Marilyn Friedman (1987) similarly seems accepting of the general framework of virtue ethics, and of crucial places for virtues of both caring and justice within such a framework, responsive to different degrees and in different ways to gender differences she believes actually do hold, though not falling along a caring/justice fault line.

Michael Slote also accepts care ethics as well-situated as a virtue ethical theory, but argues for the necessity of conceiving such a theory as “agent-based” -- holding that motivation or motives are “the ultimate bases for evaluation of action, institutions, laws, and societies” (Slote 1998, p. 173). As he has developed his view, empathic motivation has come to take an increasing role (Slote 2010, p. 124). As with Noddings and Held, for Slote the relevant questions about justice are about forms of social organization, the allocation of rights, and so on. If there is a vestige of the Platonic/Justinian model of justice as a virtue, it would appear to figure in only as a rationale for the shape of some social policies reflecting e.g. social (or perhaps global) distributive justice. But empathy is the focal normative concern throughout. The justice of a society constitutively depends on the motives of the individuals who make it up (Slote 1998, p. 187; 2010, p. 128). If the relevant motives are caring or empathic ones, then Slote’s analysis would seem to collapse the distinction between caring and justice as virtues of individual character (or motivation). That is, individuals would count as just exactly to the degree that their motivations are empathic, and they thus contribute to the laws, policies, institutions, and so on in ways that are reflective of similar motivations across society. But that is just to say that they are caring motivations as well.

A somewhat different feminist critique of a focus on a virtue of justice comes from Robin Dillon. Like Slote, her concern is more with social institutions, structures, and hierarchies than with traits of character, and in fact these priorities lead her to be critical of virtue ethical theories which, she believes, cannot ask the right questions about virtues and vices (Dillon 2012, p. 86). However, she does accept the point that character traits matter, though she believes attending to the vices that allow and support social structures that allow for oppression and domination is more pertinent to feminist moral philosophy.

Lisa Tessman, on the other hand, accepts the basic framework of Aristotelian thinking about virtues of character, and with it the virtue of justice (Tessman 2005). However, she argues that oppressive social conditions can interfere in ways Aristotle did not anticipate with the formation of virtues of character and consequently (given Aristotle’s framework) with prospects for happiness (eudaimonia). One point of amendment, then, to Aristotelian thought is to recognize that oppressive social conditions may make other traits — traits that are important for liberatory struggle — into virtues. Another, congruent with other lines of feminist critique, is that Aristotle is insufficiently appreciative of the need for sensitivity to and response to suffering, so that something like the kind of supplementation recommended by care ethics is appropriate. A different model of response to the development of the virtue of justice specifically under non-ideal or unjust social conditions, one modeled on Kohlberg’s original architectonic understanding of the virtue, is defended by Jon Garthoff (Garthoff 2018).

Finally, in recent work Talbot Brewer has argued that a “revisionist” version of Aristotelian virtue ethics does a better job than competitors (including Kantian and contractualist theories) at recognizing the “irreplaceable value” of each human being (Brewer 2018). Brewer believes that a robust conception of the virtue of justice does important work for such a theory, not just focusing on distribution and allocation, but more generally establishing the space for virtuous recognition of ways that others can demand that we treat them (Brewer 2018, p. 25). Still, Brewer invokes Aquinas to argue that such justice is not enough, that that what is required is a recognition of a virtue of love to unify and perfect the other virtues of character.

While Rawls’ work has sparked an explosion of work in distributive justice and social justice more generally, in recent years a variety of strategies to return to a focus on justice as a personal virtue has emerged. These strategies vary across both dimensions we have considered, taking with various degrees of seriousness the connection between institutional and personal forms of justice, and focusing on the latter as a virtue, among (and like) other virtues.

One such strategy is that of Jon Drydyk, who builds on the “capability approach” to human welfare to make a case for a capabilities-based account of the justice of individual agents, in particular as against an “Aristotelian” approach that stresses justice as a matter of response to merit. Acting justly involves “striving to reduce and remove inequalities in people’s capabilities to function in ways that are elemental” to a truly human life (Drydyk 2012, pp. 31, 33). This is a “subsidiary” virtue account, in that we begin with a prior conception of the content of the requirements of justice, and conform the virtue to this conception. However, Drydyk emphasizes justice as a virtue of individuals, rather than institutions or societies. Drydyk’s strategy offers a counterpoint both to the Rawlsian way of thinking about just societies and to the ancient Greek way of thinking about justice as a virtue of individuals.

John Hacker-Wright argues that what is needed to replace a “legalistic” concern with moral status (as on modern liberal conceptions of justice) is instead an ethic of virtue with a different conception of the virtue of justice. Instead of a concern for the resolution of claims in something like reciprocal, contractual relations, Hacker-Wright’s conception of the virtue of justice is a matter of sensitivity to “vulnerability of value” in things, animate and otherwise. Thus, the threat of unjust — vicious -- wronging hangs not only over people who are sufficiently cognitively impaired so as not to perceive insults, but also corpses, animals, and even rare and valuable rock formations (p. 463). This counts as a sense of justice in that, on Hacker-Wright’s view it is not merely that we can act wrongly or viciously toward such entities, but (following Midgley 1983) that they can be wronged by us by our doing so. However, while Hacker-Wright claims that on a virtue ethic “The character of the agent is recognized as ineliminable in picking out facts as they figure in our moral deliberation,” this does not strictly speaking seem to be true, as prior to virtue there is value which it is up to the just or virtuous person to respond with sensitivity (Hacker-Wright 2007, pp. 461, 463, 464).

David Schmidtz and John Thrasher suggest rethinking the relationship between social justice and individual justice (Schmidtz and Thrasher 2014). Turning Plato’s account of justice in Republic on its head, they depict justice as a bridge between a virtue of the soul and of the polis : because we are essentially social, we need community, and justice is a matter of harmony with the community. On their view this is (largely) a matter of compliance with rules and institutions that enable people to live in harmony and flourish together.

An alternative proposal for thinking of the justice as a personal virtue ties it intimately to the experiences we have as emotional creatures. On this approach, instead of justice standing as distinct from “natural virtues” motivated by passions (as on Hume’s account), or needing to be replaced by sentimentally-driven attitudes such as care or compassion, justice is to be seen as a virtue largely constituted by emotion (Solomon 1994, Roberts 2010). The virtue amounts to a stable disposition of character to respond in the relevant ways to instances of injustice, perhaps consisting in those occasions in which one does not receive his or her due, and on the other hand to be disposed to a “will to give each his due” (Roberts 2010, p. 38). For Roberts, this is a will to realize “objective justice,” and as on other recent accounts, the virtue (and the passion) are theoretically subsidiary to this primary notion of “objective justice.”

There are also recent ventures in the spirit of the ancient Greek thinking about the individual virtue of justice. Rasmussen and Den Uyl (2005) argue for two interpersonal senses of justice (pp. 160-63). One is the familiar Aristotelian virtue. The second is a “metanormative” principle governing the institutions and legal frameworks in which individual agents (just and otherwise) live their lives and exercise their practical agency. The second of these senses of interpersonal justice does not draw its content from the exercise of virtue, but rather makes a place for it. The former does depend on virtue overall (including the exercise of practical wisdom) for its demands, but these are construed broadly in the traditional way of rendering to each his due. Bloomfield (2011) similarly suggests extending the Aristotelian virtue of justice, but in an inward direction, arguing that self-respect is necessary for happiness, and treating oneself fairly requires treating oneself fairly, as one treats others fairly, as a property of justice as individuals.

On the other hand, Wolterstorff (2008) argues that the eudaimonism of Greek thought prevents a proper appreciation for the nature and significance of justice and rights. Whether there is theoretical space remaining for a virtue of justice is not a question Wolterstorff considers, but he does believe there is no hope for an adequate grip on justice in an Aristotelian or Stoic framework.

Recent thinkers have grappled with the question of priority between formal principle and virtue that vexed Aristotle, and offered solutions that for the most part subordinate the virtue of justice to the prior notion of the justice of distributions, as Aristotle himself seems to have suggested. Bernard Williams claims explicitly that this is so (Williams 1980, p. 197), as does David Wiggins, in an attempt to bring a “pre-liberal,” Aristotelian conception of justice to bear on modern liberal conceptions, a la Kant and Rawls (Wiggins 2004). To do so, Wiggins distinguishes three senses of justice: (A) a matter of outcomes or states of affairs in which each gets what is due; (B) a disposition to promote justice (A); (C) a condition of the polis in virtue of which (A) is realized. Wiggins claims that the proper outcome of this collision of conceptions is one that recognizes a form of logical priority of justice (A) over justice (B) (p. 489). At the same time, against Williams he insists that the normative demands of justice (A) are “comprehensible” only within the perspective of a person with justice (B). And in fact he claims that a necessary condition on acts and outcomes satisfying the norms of justice (A) is that they be recognized to be so by those with the virtue of justice (B). Wiggins’ thinking here is not transparent, but perhaps the thought is that the logical point is purely formal: someone with justice (B) must, in act or judging justly, be responding to some norm which counts as justice (A). But, as merely formal, that tells us nothing about the substantive content of that norm. To get that, we have ineliminable need to refer to the judgment of the person with justice (B). That marks a way perhaps of restoring Aristotle’s focus on virtue in coming to understand the virtue of justice.

LeBar (2013, 2014) takes a similar tack in attempting to incorporate Kantian and post-Kantian insights into just demands on the treatment of others into an Aristotelian virtue framework. On his view, there is no way to specify the contents of the demands of justice, or to spell out its norms, independently of the wider possession and exercise of the virtues, including the virtue of practical wisdom. At the same time, what the virtuous and just person sees, in inhabiting a social world with equals in moral standing, are the norms which have become associated with the liberal conception: the standing to obligate others and hold them accountable, for example.

Finally, all of these are Western treatments of an individual virtue of justice. May Sim (Sim 2007, 2018) makes the case that there are informative parallels between the Confucian treatment of the virtues (in particular, yi) and the virtue of justice as adumbrated in Plato and Aristotle.

There are many different conceptions of the virtue of justice, and only some of them are distinctively virtue ethical. Many non-virtual ethical approaches put forward theories of virtue, and what distinguishes them from virtue ethics is that the given theory of virtue comes later in the order of explanation, rather than itself serving as the basis for understanding (all of) morality. This is especially the case with justice, where (as we have seen) it is naturally tempting to account for the norms of justice first and derive an account of the virtue in light of those norms. The question of the priority of norms of justice or the virtue of justice is likely to continue to generate exploration and debate, as is the question of how our lives as social and political animals contributes to understanding the virtue of justice. These vexed questions have inspired a profusion of views and no doubt will continue to do so.

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• Schmidtz, D., and J. Thrasher, 2014, “The Virtues of Justice,” in K. Timpe and C. Boyd (eds.), Virtues and Their Vices , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sim, May, 2007, Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2018, “Confucian Values and Resources for Justice,” in LeBar 2018, 237–60.
• Slote, Michael, 1998, “The Justice of Caring,” Social Philosophy and Policy , 15: 171–95.
• –––, 2010, Moral Sentimentalism , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Smith, Adam, 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments , Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984.
• Solum, Lawrence B., 2008, “Natural Justice: An Aretaic Account of the Virtue of Lawfulness,” C. Farrelly and L. Solum (eds.), Virtue Jurisprudence , New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 167–192.
• Tessman, Lisa, 2005, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Thrasher, John, 2013, “Reconciling Justice and Pleasure in Epicurean Contractarianism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 16(2): 423–36.
• Widlok, Thomas, 2018, “Learning How to Share,” in LeBar 2018, 93–118.
• Wiggins, David, 2004, “Neo-Aristotelian Reflections on Justice,” Mind , 113(451): 477–512.
• Williams, Bernard, 1973, “The Analogy of Soul and State in Plato’s Republic,” in E. N. Lee, A. P. D. Mourelatos, and R. M. Rorty (eds.), Exegesis and Argument , New York: Humanities Press, 196–206.
• Williams, Bernard, 1980, “Justice as a Virtue,” in A. E. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , Berkeley: University of California Press, 189–99.
• Wilson, Bart J. “Becoming Just by Eliminating Injustice: The Emergence of Property in Virtual Economies,” in LeBar 2018, 67–92.
• Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 2008, Justice: Rights and Wrongs , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Woodruff, Paul, 2018, “Growing toward Justice,” in LeBar 2018, 13–38.

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.

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What ‘Justice’ Really Means

The word has taken a beating in the past few weeks. But what role does it truly play in our lives?

By Paul Bloomfield

Mr. Bloomfield is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

It’s a staple of common sense that we don’t let judges try their own cases. Yet if we are to gain self-knowledge, we all must do just that: We must judge ourselves to know ourselves. While we typically think of justice as a virtue of social arrangements or political institutions, the United States has recently bore witness to this virtue in its first-person aspect — self-regarding justice — while watching the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court Justice.

The virtue of justice requires not only that we judge others fairly, but also that we judge ourselves fairly. This is no mean feat. The trouble is that if a person is a poor judge of him or herself, it is hard to imagine that person being a good judge of others. Bias toward the self often leads to bias against others. Justice begins within ourselves.

While justice is important for each of us in our personal lives, it becomes strikingly important when we think of those in positions of power. We need leaders motivated by a love of justice and not merely self-aggrandizement. Leadership without an inner moral compass reliably pointing toward justice inevitably ends in the abuse of power.

Philosophically, all virtues are ideals that we can only approach without fully attaining them. So, we can always aspire to do better. Given this, what role does the virtue of justice play in our personal lives? What role ought it to play?

In fact there are two roles: Justice functions both in our epistemology, or how we form and justify our beliefs, as well as in practical morality, informing our private and public behavior. These ought to be entwined in our lives since we ought not only think in a fair and just manner but also act accordingly.

The apotheosis of justice is the courtroom judge, interpreting the law and ruling on evidence concerning innocence and guilt. Model judges are epistemically just: Their cognitive processes are never biased or unduly swayed, their conclusions are not prejudged, and their verdicts reliably correspond to the facts. Truth is their goal. Not only must there be no thumb on the scale, the evidence must be balanced while wearing a blindfold. The rulings of judges, however, are also undeniably moral, bearing as they do on issues of justice, restitution and the execution of punishment.

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The Concept of Justice

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• Wojciech Sadurski 4  

Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library ((LAPS,volume 2))

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What is the use of defining justice? One could argue that a definition of justice should be the product of reflections about justice, rather than a starting point. In the case of evaluative concepts such as liberty, democracy and justice, the distinction between defining and advocating is extremely hard to make. Any such definition presupposes certain values and those values should be defended rather than contained in an inevitably arbitrary definition.

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For a not dissimilar account of concept/conception distinction, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 5, 9–10

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Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously ( London: Duckworth, 1978 ), pp. 134–136

On definitions of ethical concepts, see Richard Robinson, Definition ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950 ), pp. 165–170.

John Stuart Mill, `Utilitarianism’, in Utilitarianism , On Liberty , Essay on Bentham , ed. by Mary Warnock ( London: Collins, 1962 ), p. 306.

Iredell Jenkins, Social Order and the Limits of Law ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980 ), p. 324.

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962; Ist. ed. 1874), pp. 265–266.

Brian Barry, Political Argument ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965 ), p. 44.

Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 98–99, and in a much more developed form in his essay Noncomparative Justice’, in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), reprinted from The Philosophical Review (1974). Subsequent references in brackets in the main text discussing Feinberg’s views are to the pages of this essay.

Phillip Montague, `Comparative and Non-Comparative Justice’, Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1980), p. 132.

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This example of `absolute’ (as opposed to `comparative’) principle of justice is given by Barry, op. cit. ,p. 44 in connection with p. 96.

Rachel Karniol and Dale T. Miller, `Morality and the Development of Conceptions of Justice’, in Melvin J. Lerner and Sally C. Lerner, eds., The Justice Motive in Social Behavior ( New York and London: Plenum Press, 1981 ), p. 76.

See Wojciech Sadurski, “Non-Comparative Justice” Revisited’, Archiv für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie 69 (1983), pp. 504–514, esp. 505–507.

Eugène Dupréel, Traité de morale ,Vol. 2 (Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1967; 1st ed. 1932), pp. 485–491.

Friedrich A. Hayek, Law , Legislation and Liberty , Vol. 2 ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976 ), p. 31.

Friedrich A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy , Politics , Economics and the History of Ideas ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 ), p. 58.

See excellent discussion by John Kleinig, `Good Samaritanism’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 5 (1976), pp. 382–407, esp. pp. 391–398.

James Gordley, `Equality in Exchange’, California Law Review 69 (1981), p. 1589.

Georges Burdeau, Traité de science politique ,Vol. V (Paris: Librarie générale de droit et de la jurisprudence), p. 89.

Halsbury’s Laws of England (London: Butterworths, 1977), 4th ed., Vol. 18, p. 344. On the development of this doctrine in the United Kingdom, see S. M. Waddams, ‘Unconscionability in Contracts’, Modern Law Review 39 (1976), pp. 369–393.

Horwood v. Millar’s Timber and Trading Co. Ltd. [1917] 1 K.B. 305, 311.

This Act has been replaced by the Consumer Credit Act (1974).

Contracts Review Act, 1980 (N.S.W.), s.7(1)

John Goldring, Joan L. Pratt, D. E. J. Ryan, `The Contracts Review Act (N.S.W.)’, University of N.S.W. Law Journal 4 (1981), pp. 1–16.

Tasman Dry Cleaners (Balmain)Pty. Ltd. v. Diamond [ 1960 ] N.S.W.R. 419.

A. Schroeder Music Publishing Co. Ltd. v. Macaulay [1974] 3 All E.R. 616. 36. Ibid., at p. 623. See also Lloyds Bank Ltd. v. Bundy [1974] 3 All E.R. 757.

See Lord Denning M. R. in Clifford Davis Management Ltd. v. W.E.A. Records Ltd. [1975] 1 All E.R. 237, a case concerning two musicians who signed an evidently unfair contract with their manager. He said (at p. 240): “They were composers talented in music and song but not in business. In negotiation they could not hold their own”.

U.S. V. Bethlehem Steel Corp., 315 U.S. 289, 326–328 (1941), Frankfurter, J., dissenting.

See a recent powerful restatement of this proposition by Anthony T. Kronman, `Contract Law and Distributive Justice’, Yale Law Journal 89 (1980), pp. 472–511.

Scott v. U.S., 79 U.S. 443, 445 (1870). On the recent development of this doctrine in the U.S., see particularly M. P. Ellinghaus, `In Defense of Unconscionability’, Yale Law Journal 78 (1969), pp. 757–815

John E. Murray, `Unconscionability: Unconscionability’, University of Pittsburgh Law Review 31 (1969), pp. 1–80.

See, e.g., Richard E. Epstein, `Unconscionability: A Critical Reappraisal’, Journal of Law and Economics 18 (1975), pp. 293–315 and Arthur Allen Leff, `Unconscionability and the Crowd — Consumers and the Common Law Tradition’, University of Pittsburgh Law Review 31 (1970), pp. 349–358.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ,ed. by C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, 1st ed. 1651), p. 208.

John Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence or the Philosophy of Positive Law (London: John Murray, 1920, 1st ed. 1832), p. 108.

Hans Kelsen, What Is Justice? ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971 ), p. 430.

John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), in particular pp. 363 —366.

Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972, 1st ed. 1964), pp. 33–39.

L. L. Fuller, `Positivism and Fidelity to Law’, Harvard Law Review 71 (1958), p. 474.

See also Peter P. Nicholson, `The Internal Morality of Law: Fuller and His Critics’, Ethics 84 (1974), pp. 307–320.

H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 ), p. 206.

See A. M. Honoré, `Social Justice’, McGill Law Journal 8 (1962), p. 82.

Dupréel, op. cit. , pp.485–489; D. D. Raphael, Justice and Liberty (London: Athlone Press, 1980), pp. 80–93; Sidgwick, op. cit. , p. 293; Chaim Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963 ), p. 63.

See Julius Stone, Legal System and Lawyers’ Reasoning (Sydney: Maitland Publications, 1968, 1st ed. 1964), pp. 263–267.

W. J. Wagner, `Equity and Its Socialist Equivalent in the Polish Legal System’, Review of Socialist Law 1 (1975), pp. 151–169.

Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), p. 410 (trans. A. Wedberg).

Ronald Dworkin, ’ “Natural” Law Revisited’, University of Florida Law Review 34 (1982), p. 165.

See, in particular, Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), ch. 7.

See, e.g., Norman P. Barry, An Introduction to Modern Political Theory ( London: Macmillan, 1981 ), p. 119.

See also William Nelson, `The Very Idea of Pure Procedural Justice’, Ethics 90 (1980), pp. 502–511.

David Resnick, `Due Process and Procedural Justice’ in J. Roland Pennock, John W. Chapman, eds., Due Process , Nomos XVIII ( New York: New York University Press, 1977 ), p. 213.

Rupert Cross, Evidence , Australian Edition by J. A. Gobbo (Sydney: Butterworths, 1970 ), p. 288.

Hawkins v. United States, 358 U.S. 74, 75 (1958).

Carl J. Friedrich, `Justice: The Just Political Act’, in Carl J. Friedrich, John W. Chapman, eds., Justice , Nomos VI (New York: Atherton Press, 1963), pp. 27–28, 43.

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Sadurski, W. (1985). The Concept of Justice. In: Giving Desert Its Due. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7706-9_2

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New Essay Collection from Columbia University Press Offers Latest and Best Thinking on Criminal Justice, and What Must Be Done 

New Essay Collection from Columbia University Press Offers Latest and Best Thinking on Criminal Justice, and What Must Be Done 

Edited by the Brennan Center’s Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Excessive Punishment is a reality check on crime and justice in 2024

• Changing Incentives
• Cutting Jail & Prison Populations
• Prison and Jail Reform
• Social & Economic Harm

Anti-mass incarceration efforts have succeeded in bringing reform without sacrificing public safety, but an overreliance on punitive responses have limited their impact, especially for people of color

Contributors include Paul Butler, Alexes Harris, Michael Mendoza, Nkechi Taifa, Bruce Western

Today Columbia University Press published Excessive Punishment: How the Justice System Creates Mass Incarceration . Lauren-Brooke Eisen , director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, solicited 38 essays from criminal justice scholars, practitioners, and advocates, as well as former law enforcement and people who have experienced incarceration. 

“The noise and disinformation about crime is hitting its usual election-year peak. This book cuts through all that,” says Eisen. “It shows that public safety, justice, and fairness are compatible goals that must be achieved together if they are to be achieved at all. The current dominant method— the blend of mass incarceration and perpetual punishment – has failed on all three counts: public safety, justice, and fairness.”

The contributors to the collection include Paul Butler , Jennifer Chacón , Khalil Cumberbatch , Alexes Harris , Michael Mendoza , Nkechi Taifa ,  Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western , and many others (complete list below). They delve into the unfinished work of the criminal justice reform movement. Why does so much of the criminal justice system remain locked on overincarceration? How do factors like structural racism and economic incentives work against commonsense reforms?   A sampling:

• “ Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Disastrous War on Drugs ” by Nkechi Taifa, civil rights attorney
• “ Monetary Sanctions as a Pound of Flesh ” by Alexes Harris, University of Washington
• “ Providing Hope and Freedom to Overpunished People: Where Both Seem Impossible to Achieve ” by David Singleton, University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law
• “ Addressing Violent Crime More Effectively ” by David Alan Sklansky, Stanford Law School
• “ The Inhumanity of Solitary Confinement ” by Christopher Blackwell, who is incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center in Washington state

The book has earned advance praise for its depth, scope, and solutions from U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner (ret.), Judith Resnik (Yale), Emily Bazelon ( The New York Times Magazine ), James Cadogan (National Basketball Social Justice Coalition), and more. (Their comments are below.) 

On Wednesday, April 3 , at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT, the Brennan Center along with the Commonwealth Club of California and The Last Mile will host a panel at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (live-streamed as well) to discuss the themes and questions raised by Excessive Punishment . Eisen will be joined by fellow contributor Michael Mendoza, along with retired Superior Court of Northern California Judge LaDoris Cordell , Kevin McCracken of The Last Mile, and Ken Oliver of the Checkr Foundation. To RSVP for an in-person spot or for the live stream, please email John Zipperer at the Commonwealth Club. 

On Wednesday, April 17 , at 3 p.m. ET, the Brennan Center will also host a live, virtual event. Eisen will moderate a conversation with fellow contributors Jeremy Travis of the Columbia Justice Lab , Khalil Cumberbatch of the Council on Criminal Justice, and Nkechi Taifa , a civil rights attorney. RSVP here . Excessive Punishment will be the subject of other upcoming events. Please email Derek Rosenfeld to find out more.

In addition to leading the criminal justice work at the Brennan Center, Eisen is a former prosecutor and the author of Inside Private Prisons (Columbia, 2017).

Advance Praise for Excessive Punishment

“This book weaves a path toward reform of the fragmented system of criminal punishment in the United States, which produces too many harms and too little safety for anyone. Essays brilliantly distill the histories of control and racism, and they map how to reorient interactions on streets, in prisons, and after release to recognize the political voice and social worth of all members of the country.” –   Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School

“This book breaks through the tropes about what it takes for our criminal legal system to ensure public safety; it smashes the generalizations that have fueled our failed experiment in mass incarceration for the past several decades. And it does so with experts of all kinds—scholars, activists, practitioners—who chronicle how our system went off the rails and, more important, how to fix it.” –  U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner (ret.)

“This book brings together an amazing array of contributors to outline the biggest problems with American conceptions and implementation of punishment—and also to propose solutions.” –  Emily Bazelon , author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration and staff writer, The New York Times Magazine

“In 2020, millions of Americans came together in an unprecedented call for a more just society. This collection of essays by some of the country’s foremost thinkers continues that work—helping us understand the history of our carceral system and offering a blueprint for how we can create safe, healthy, and thriving communities from coast to coast.” – James Cadogan , executive director, National Basketball Social Justice Coalition

“As someone who endured fourteen years within the confines of federal prison, I have witnessed the stark and often brutal realities of our criminal justice system. Excessive Punishment is a beacon of insight onto the cycle of mass incarceration that grips our nation.” – Louis L. Reed , activist and film producer

Contributors to Excessive Punishment

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson shares the poem she's kept in every one of her offices

Tonya Mosley

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn-in during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 21, 2022. Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America hide caption

In every office she's ever had, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has kept a copy of   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, " The Ladder of Saint Augustine ." There's one stanza in particular that she likes:

The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.

"I love the idea that in order to be successful, it takes hard work," Jackson says. "You can't always control whether you're the smartest person in the room, for example, but you [can] commit to being the hardest worker."

Jackson traces her interest in studying law back to her childhood. When she was 4, her father enrolled in law school at the University of Miami. She remembers sitting at the kitchen table with her coloring books, across from her father and his stack of law journals.

"We would work together and he'd ask me questions," she says. "It was really a bonding moment for me."

Interview highlights

Ketanji brown jackson gets personal with npr about family and the supreme court.

Jackson went on to attend Harvard for both undergrad and law school. As a young lawyer, she says, she was often at the office before anyone else — and then she'd stay until everyone else had gone home. Working as a public defender helped shape the type of judge she would become.

"One of the things I discovered very early on was how few of my clients really understood what had happened to them in the trial process," Jackson says. "And so when I became a judge, I really focused on being clear."

In 2022, Jackson became the first Black woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. During her first year on the bench, she spoke more than any other justice in that same term — a marked departure from past justices who sometimes take years before becoming vocal. Now Jackson is sharing her story in a new memoir, Lovely One. (The title of the book derives from a translation of Jackson's West African name, “Ketanji Onyika.")

Lovely One Penguin Random House hide caption

On learning about Constance Baker Motley , the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court

Judge Motley was appointed to the court in the ‘60s, I believe. And this is the court in the Southern District of New York. And I was born in 1970. And when I was in late elementary school, early middle school, I came across an article about her in Essence or Ebony , one of the Black magazines that my parents subscribed to. And, gosh, I mean, it was such an eye opener for me, in part because I learned that we share a birthday, September 14th. We were born on exactly the same day, 49 years apart. ...

And so here we had this woman who was a lawyer and who had gone on to be a judge, and the thought of being a judge just kind of planted in my mind. And it was something I guess I'd always wanted to do. And this was also around the time when Justice O'Connor had been appointed to the Supreme Court. So now we had a woman judge on the Supreme Court. I just remember those things being very motivational for me, early on.

On growing up in D.C. with parents from the South, who wanted her to be proud of being Black

I was born at this very, very pivotal time in American history. I was a first inheritor of Dr. Martin Luther King's dream ... if Dr. Martin Luther King presented America with a metaphorical check come due, my generation reaped the first installment. So what it meant for my parents, who were now young people with a baby coming of age in this really, sort of time of opportunity after being so limited in their upbringing, they wanted me to do all of the activities that they had been restricted in doing. But they also felt pretty strongly that it was important to shore up my own self-esteem. Having grown up in a society in which there was so much negative imagery and messaging about African Americans, they were worried that that would undermine my ability to perform in white spaces. And so they carefully monitored what I watched and worked on the inputs.

On what she was like in high school

Author Interviews

As a latina, sonia sotomayor says, 'you have to work harder'.

It was a predominantly white school. ... I was popular. I was the student body president three years in a row. So I had a lot of friends and people who liked me, but no dates, which got to be a little bit of an issue my senior year because the student body president, one of the things you're responsible for is planning the prom. And I wasn't going to go until a friend of mine who was a junior said, "Who are you going to go to prom with?" And I was like, "No one." And he was like, "Well, why don't I take you? Why don't we go together?" So I went with him, just so I could go and not be totally left out of an activity that I was planning. But it was not easy to be a high school student and feeling like everybody else is dating and people have crushes, and not being a part of the culture was a little challenging.

On how she met her husband at Harvard

So I am in this class, and he's cute. He's sitting behind me. He's chatting with me and tapping on my shoulder and doing silly things. And afterwards we start to develop a friendship, talking about the material. And he would walk me to my next class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then on Tuesday and Thursday, I thought I saw him in our government class, and I would lean down the row and wave and he would, like, roll his eyes like, "Who is this lady?" And I thought, this is kind of weird. Like, why would this guy be so nice to be on some days and not on the others? And I told my roommates about it and they were like, "Leave him alone. He's crazy. You don't want to be with a crazy person!" One of the nice days … I went up to him and I said, "Why don't you speak to me in our government class?" And he said, "I'm not taking a government class." And I said, "Yes, you are." And then it dawned on him that I must be talking about his twin brother.

On how she had her husband have both balanced career and family

'Out Of Order' At The Court: O'Connor On Being The First Female Justice

I think very early on we kind of decided to take turns. We could see how there would be different points in each of our careers where the other person's professional needs would have to take precedence. It's like we could have it all, but not at the same time. And so there were periods when he was in his surgical residency, for example, he couldn't do anything more than the 20 hours of service that they required in the hospital, sleeping overnight, doing [it] all. And so then I took a lot of the home responsibilities. And when I was clerking for the Supreme Court, it was flipped. He took time out of his residency to do research in Washington, came down and supported me. He brought me dinner at the Court.

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Krishnadev Calamur adapted it for the web.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson discusses new memoir, ‘Lovely One,’ at Apollo Theater

FILE - Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is seen after her formal investiture ceremony at the Supreme Court, in Washington, Sept. 30, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

This cover image released by Random House shows “Lovely One” by Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Random House via AP)

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NEW YORK (AP) — In one of her first public appearances on behalf of her newly published memoir , “Lovely One,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t make a lot of news, but she did make a little history: She can add her name to James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson among others as someone who has sung at the Apollo Theater.

Reminiscing Tuesday night with interviewer Gayle King about her love for musical theater, Jackson ably crooned a few lines from “The Wiz” — “When I think of home, I think of a place/Where there’s love overflowing” — and threw in a favorite chant from “Schoolhouse Rock” — “I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.”

The capacity audience at the famed Harlem performance center cheered and sang along.

King had promised — and kept her promise — to focus on Jackson’s personal story and not on the law. Jackson discussed her childhood in Miami, the origins of her name (It means “lovely one,” the book’s title), her undergraduate years at Harvard University, her interracial marriage to Dr. Patrick Jackson — who was in the audience Tuesday night — and her rise through the court system, culminating in 2022 when she became the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. “A roaring ocean” in her ears is how she remembered the call from President Joe Biden, asking her if she would agree to fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she had once clerked.

Jackson explained Tuesday that she had been interested since she was a girl, when she and her father, Johnny Brown, would sit together at the dining room table, she with coloring books and he with law books he was studying at the time. Her ambition grew in middle school after she learned about Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal judiciary.

“I remember this kinship with this fantastic woman,” Jackson told King. “I thought, ‘Why stop at law? I could be a federal judge.”

Jackson’s book, 405 pages, combines family history, legal history and personal history as she narrates her own improbable journey — a Black woman rising to the highest court in a country where segregation was legal well into the 20th century. “Lovely One” often reads as a kind of lesson, or roadmap, what Jackson calls in the preface “a testament for young women, people of color, and strivers everywhere, especially those who nourished outsized ambitions and believe with stubborn faith in the possibility of achieving them.”

She endured aggressive questions from Republican senators during her confirmation hearings and she currently serves on one of the most conservative and divisive courts in U.S. history, casting dissenting votes on such landmark rulings as the granting of partial legal immunity for former presidents. But Jackson avoided naming names — beyond noting that Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, attended law school with her — or pointing fingers in her book, and resisted Tuesday night when King pressed her to cite even one justice she had clashed with.

“I’m not going to answer that question,” she said, laughing.

When King asked if justices socialized, Jackson responded, “There are opportunities to have lunch.”

Jackson spoke of remaining calm during the confirmation hearings, thanks to her resolve, her preparation and to political realities. The White House worked with her at length in advance, helping her anticipate questions that might otherwise have upset her. One aide had advised she had a choice: “You can get angry or you can be a Supreme Court justice.” Jackson also welcomed another suggestion: Meet with the senators before the hearings.

“They were all lovely. Person to person they were courteous, they were respectful,” she said Tuesday night. “It was ... super helpful in the hearings, because we had had conversations. So I said, ‘Oh, I see. You’re not really talking to me’ — right in my head, as I’m listening to them — because we had talked. ‘You must be talking to your constituents or to someone else.’”

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By Michelle Maiese  and Heidi Burgess

(Original written by Michelle Maiese and published July 2003; updated by Heidi Burgess in June 2013, and again in July, 2020.)

Current Implications

The word "justice" is being used a lot in the summer of 2020, usually in the phrase "Justice for George Floyd" or "Justice for Breonna Taylor" or "racial justice." But few people seem to be unpacking what the term "justice" means.  It is hard to understand how defunding the police would bring justice to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, although, some might argue it would mean their deaths were not in vain. But let's unpack the notion of justice in the context of this summer's events.  More...

Justice is action in accordance with the requirements of some law. Whether these rules are grounded in human consensus or societal norms, they are supposed to ensure that all members of society receive fair treatment. Issues of justice arise in several different spheres and play a significant role in causing, perpetuating, and addressing conflict. Just institutions tend to instill a sense of stability, well-being, and satisfaction among society members, while perceived injustices can lead to dissatisfaction, rebellion, or revolution. Each of the different spheres expresses the principles of justice and fairness in its own way, resulting in different types and concepts of justice: distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative. These types of justice have important implications for socio-economic, political, civil, and criminal justice at both the national and international level.[1]

Distributive justice , or economic justice, is concerned with giving all members of society a "fair share" of the benefits and resources available. However, while everyone might agree that wealth should be distributed fairly, there is much disagreement about what counts as a "fair share." Some possible criteria of distribution are equity, equality, and need. (Equity means that one's rewards should be equal to one's contributions to a society, while "equality" means that everyone gets the same amount, regardless of their input. Distribution on the basis of need means that people who need more will get more, while people who need less will get less.) Fair allocation of resources, or distributive justice, is crucial to the stability of a society and the well-being of its members. Different people will define "fair" differently: some will say that fairness is equity; others equality; still others, need. When issues of distributive justice are inadequately addressed and the item to be distributed is highly valued, intractable conflicts frequently result. This was the essence of the conflicts playing out across Europe and in United States politics in 2012-2013--over taxes, deficits, "austerity programs," jobs, rights of labor, etc. It is part of the story about the racial conflicts which have taken a high profile in the summer of 2020, although procedural and retributive justice are also a large part of this conflict.

Procedural justice is concerned with making and implementing decisions according to fair processes that ensure "fair treatment." Rules must be impartially followed and consistently applied in order to generate an unbiased decision. Those carrying out the procedures should be neutral, and those directly affected by the decisions should have some voice or representation in the decision-making process. (See the essay on public participation .) If people believe procedures to be fair, they will be more likely to accept outcomes, even ones that they do not like. Implementing fair procedures is central to many dispute resolution procedures, including negotiation , mediation , arbitration , and adjudication .

Retributive justice appeals to the notion of "just desert" -- the idea that people deserve to be treated in the same way they treat others. It is a retroactive approach that justifies punishment as a response to past injustice or wrongdoing.[2] The central idea is that the offender has gained unfair advantage through his or her behavior, and that punishment will set this imbalance straight. In other words, those who do not play by the rules should be brought to justice and deserve to suffer penalties for their transgressions. The notion of deterrence also plays in here: the hope is that the punishment for committing a crime is large enough that people will not engage in illegal activities because the risk of punishment is too high. In addition to local, state, and national justice systems, retributive justice also plays a central role in international legal proceedings, responding to violations of international law ,  human rights , and war crimes .

However, because there is a tendency to slip from retributive justice to an emphasis on revenge, some suggest that restorative justice processes are more effective. While a retributive justice approach conceives of transgressions as crimes against the state or nation, restorative justice focuses on violations as crimes against individuals. It is concerned with healing victims ' wounds, restoring offenders to law-abiding lives, and repairing harm done to interpersonal relationships and the community. Victims take an active role in directing the exchange that takes place, as well as defining the responsibilities and obligations of offenders. Offenders are encouraged to understand the harm they have caused their victims and take responsibility for it. Restorative justice aims to strengthen the community and prevent similar harms from happening in the future. At the national level, such processes are often carried out through victim-offender mediation programs, while at the international level restorative justice is often a matter of instituting truth and reconciliation commissions .[3]  

The word "justice" is being used a lot in the summer, usually in the phrase "Justice for George Floyd" or "Justice for Breonna Taylor" or "racial justice." But few people seem to be unpacking what the term "justice" means.  It is hard to understand how defunding the police would bring justice to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, although, some might argue it would mean their deaths were not in vain. But let's unpack the notion of justice in the context of this summer's events.

This article points out that there are four different types of justice: distributive (determining who gets what), procedural (determining how fairly people are treated), retributive (based on punishment for wrong-doing) and restorative (which tries to restore relationships to "rightness.")  All four of these are relevant to the events of summer 2020, and more broadly to race relations in the United States and elsewhere.

Most of the focus, it seems, is on procedural justice.  George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many, many other Black people were treated much more harshly by the police (indeed, in these two cases infinitely more harshly as they were killed) than are typical whites when they encounter the police. While it is true that unarmed White people have also been shot, statistics show that such outcomes befall Blacks in grossly disproportionate ways compared to Whites.  Similarly (though this is being talked about less), Blacks do worse throughout the entire justice process.  They are apprehended more, they are put in jail more, kept there longer (being unable to make bail as easily as most Whites can) and they are convicted and receive longer sentences than do Whites.  This is the very essence of procedural injustice, and it should be the focus of attention just as much as the narrower question of police shootings.

The focus, to a lesser extent, is on retributive justice, particularly whether and how the police officers that killed Floyd, Taylor, or others will be held accountable.  Historically, police are seldom held accountable for excessive use of force.  This is sometimes due to the notion of "qualified immunity" which holds that public officials cannot be held responsible for professional misconduct unless they violated "clearly established law."  While one would think that shooting an unarmed civilian would be a violation of "clearly established law," in principle, in the past that has been very difficult to uphold in court, and most police have thus not been tried at all, or were acquitted when they were tried.  (That said, there is an argument to be made that some accommodation ought to be made for law enforcement officers who are repeatedly sent into dangerous situations with almost no information about what, exactly, is happening and where they may be called upon to instantly decide how best to respond to potentially deadly threats. In the case of George Floyd, however, it seems very clear that the officer who killed Floyd was not being personally threatened, nor did he have to make an instantaneous decision.  

On the other hand, as I discussed in the paragraph about procedural justice, retributive justice is alive and well when it comes to sentencing Blacks.  They are much less likely than Whites to get off with easy plea bargains, and are likely to get harsher sentences with less opportunity for parole.  So this, too is an issue that needs to be looked at and likely remedied.

The notion of distributive justice isn't being discussed as much this summer, but it certainly is a big part of the story of race in this country, and it is beginning to be talked about more.  We just published a new case study on Beyond Intractability that looked at how reconciliation between Blacks and Whites was sabotaged during the post-Civil War "Reconstruction Era." The way released slaves were treated just after the war set them and our country as a whole on a course of distributive injustice no matter how you define it: equity, equality, or need. 

There is no way to make things right with generations that have passed, but we certainly should look now at how we can start to make things right after 150 years.  However, it is probably unrealistic to expect that current generations of Whites will be willing or even able to compensate for 150 years' worth of loses. Nor, I would argue, is it reasonable to expect them to do so. But it is reasonable to ask Whites and Blacks (and others who have suffered a history of discrimination to sit down together and to jointly develop an image of what distributive justice would look like for everyone now—and into the future.  The only way such a discussion could possibly succeed, and indeed, the only way policy changes to come out of such discussions could possibly succeed, is if everyone really means everyone.  They would need to come to an agreement about how distributive justice should be defined, and how we can get there from where we are now.  Both agreements would need to be sufficiently inclusive that people of all races would "buy in" to these ideas and agree to start working toward them.  If any one group tries to impose its own narrow and self-serving image of justice on the others, it will not have sufficient support to be attainable over the short or long terms.

The final type of justice is restorative, and while this one should have a lot of relevance in this summer's discussion, I have heard hardly a mention of it.  Restorative justice seeks to restore relationships to "rightness."  Now, it could be argued that it is impossible to restore relationships to rightness when they never were "right," but if one modified the notion of restorative justice to mean justice to create healthy relationships where they were absent before, you would have a very powerful tool for social justice, it seems to me.  Restorative justice seeks to repair what is broken, compensate victims for harms done, and reconcile relationships between individual people so that they can live together peacefully in the future.  True, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cannot live peacefully with anybody. But police can engage in restorative justice with the communities Floyd and Taylor lived in; indeed, police in all U.S. cities could engage in restorative justice with their citizens to good effect.  Blacks and Whites—and other peoples—could engage in restorative justice circles all around the country to try to understand each other better, and to try to develop an image of what a racially "just" society would look like, and what we can do to move in that direction. 

Such an exploration should, of course, also explore law enforcement's side of the story. There are lots of big, society-wide problems that the larger society has failed and, in many ways, not even tried, to address—drug abuse, alcoholism, inadequate care for the mentally ill, homelessness, lack of employment opportunities, poor schools, etc.  Police are, in essence, being told to use their law enforcement toolkit to keep these problems from threatening the security of more fortunate segments of the society.  We all need to own our part of the problem.

Until we unpack, understand, and pursue all four of these types of justice, racial justice and racial peace will remain an elusive goal.

-- Heidi Burgess. July, 2020.

[1] More for information on justice, see: Morton Deutsch, "Justice and Conflict," in The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice , Morton Deutsch, Peter T. Coleman, Eric C. Marcus, eds. (John Wiley & Sons, 2011). < http://books.google.com/books?id=rw61VDID7U4C >.

[2] See the chapter "Retributive Justice and the Limits of Forgiveness in Argentina," in Mark R. Amstutz, The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). < http://books.google.com/books?id=gTFnh2GuD8EC >.

[3] For further clarification of the different forms of justice, including retributive, restorative, and procedural, see Jeffrey A. Jenkins's discussion on "Types of Justice," in The American Courts: A Procedural Approach , (Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2011). < http://books.google.com/books?id=yvT5SVwbakUC >.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Types of Justice." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: July 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/types-of-justice >.

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Justice in moscow.

Journal Article

Please visit the Law Library to Access this resource

• --> Justice in Moscow? -->
• --> Kathryn Hendley -->

Published In

• --> Post-Soviet Affairs -->
• --> 2015 -->

Bibliographic Citation

• --> Kathryn Hendley, Justice in Moscow?, 32 Post-Soviet Affairs 491 (2015). -->
• --> The article explores Russians' satisfaction with their experiences in court and with the legal system more generally.The analysis draws on a nationally representative survey of Russians, fielded by the Levada Center in 2010.The results show that most court veterans believe that the decision in their case was just, and that the judge treated them well. But these positive feelings do not extend beyond their case. Russians who have no court experience tend to have more favorable views about the legal system than do court veterans. These findings serve to remind us of the difficulty of building confidence in the legal system in post-Soviet Russia. -->
• --> Courts -->
• --> justice -->
• --> lawyers -->
• --> telephone law -->

Public Note

• --> Additional bibliographic information: Hendley, K. (2015). Justice in Moscow? Post-Soviet Affairs, 32(6), 491-511. -->
• --> Due to copyright restrictions, this item is not available for full-text download outside the UW Law School.;This item is also available on the publisher's website here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1060586X.2015.1091564 -->

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Intro Essay: The Civil Rights Movement

To what extent did founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for african americans during the civil rights movement.

• I can explain the importance of local and federal actions in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
• I can compare the goals and methods of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Malcolm X and Black Nationalism, and Black Power.
• I can explain challenges African Americans continued to face despite victories for equality and justice during the civil rights movement.

Essential Vocabulary

Continuing the Heroic Struggle for Equality: The Civil Rights Movement

The struggle to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence a reality for Black Americans reached a climax after World War II. The activists of the civil rights movement directly confronted segregation and demanded equal civil rights at the local level with physical and moral courage and perseverance. They simultaneously pursued a national strategy of systematically filing lawsuits in federal courts, lobbying Congress, and pressuring presidents to change the laws. The civil rights movement encountered significant resistance, however, and suffered violence in the quest for equality.

During the middle of the twentieth century, several Black writers grappled with the central contradictions between the nation’s ideals and its realities, and the place of Black Americans in their country. Richard Wright explored a raw confrontation with racism in Native Son (1940), while Ralph Ellison led readers through a search for identity beyond a racialized category in his novel Invisible Man (1952), as part of the Black quest for identity. The novel also offered hope in the power of the sacred principles of the Founding documents. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun , first performed in 1959, about the dreams deferred for Black Americans and questions about assimilation. Novelist and essayist James Baldwin described Blacks’ estrangement from U.S. society and themselves while caught in a racial nightmare of injustice in The Fire Next Time (1963) and other works.

World War II wrought great changes in U.S. society. Black soldiers fought for a “double V for victory,” hoping to triumph over fascism abroad and racism at home. Many received a hostile reception, such as Medgar Evers who was blocked from voting at gunpoint by five armed whites. Blacks continued the Great Migration to southern and northern cities for wartime industrial work. After the war, in 1947, Jackie Robinson endured racial taunts on the field and segregation off it as he broke the color barrier in professional baseball and began a Hall of Fame career. The following year, President Harry Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and banning discrimination in the civil service. Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall and his legal team at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meticulously prepared legal challenges to discrimination, continuing a decades-long effort.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund brought lawsuits against segregated schools in different states that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , 1954. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal.” Brown II followed a year after, as the court ordered that the integration of schools should be pursued “with all deliberate speed.” Throughout the South, angry whites responded with a campaign of “massive resistance” and refused to comply with the order, while many parents sent their children to all-white private schools. Middle-class whites who opposed integration joined local chapters of citizens’ councils and used propaganda, economic pressure, and even violence to achieve their ends.

A wave of violence and intimidation followed. In 1955, teenager Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was lynched after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. Though an all-white jury quickly acquitted the two men accused of killing him, Till’s murder was reported nationally and raised awareness of the injustices taking place in Mississippi.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks (who was a secretary of the Montgomery NAACP) was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Her willingness to confront segregation led to a direct-action movement for equality. The local Women’s Political Council organized the city’s Black residents into a boycott of the bus system, which was then led by the Montgomery Improvement Association. Black churches and ministers, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, provided a source of strength. Despite arrests, armed mobs, and church bombings, the boycott lasted until a federal court desegregated the city buses. In the wake of the boycott, the leading ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) , which became a key civil rights organization.

Rosa Parks is shown here in 1955 with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background. The Montgomery bus boycott was an important victory in the civil rights movement.

In 1957, nine Black families decided to send their children to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent their entry, and one student, Elizabeth Eckford, faced an angry crowd of whites alone and barely escaped. President Eisenhower was compelled to respond and sent in 1,200 paratroops from the 101st Airborne to protect the Black students. They continued to be harassed, but most finished the school year and integrated the school.

That year, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that created a civil rights division in the Justice Department and provided minimal protections for the right to vote. The bill had been watered down because of an expected filibuster by southern senators, who had recently signed the Southern Manifesto, a document pledging their resistance to Supreme Court decisions such as Brown .

In 1960, four Black college students were refused lunch service at a local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and they spontaneously staged a “sit-in” the following day. Their resistance to the indignities of segregation was copied by thousands of others of young Blacks across the South, launching another wave of direct, nonviolent confrontation with segregation. Ella Baker invited several participants to a Raleigh conference where they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and issued a Statement of Purpose. The group represented a more youthful and daring effort that later broke with King and his strategy of nonviolence.

In contrast, Malcolm X became a leading spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI) who represented Black separatism as an alternative to integration, which he deemed an unworthy goal. He advocated revolutionary violence as a means of Black self-defense and rejected nonviolence. He later changed his views, breaking with the NOI and embracing a Black nationalism that had more common ground with King’s nonviolent views. Malcolm X had reached out to establish ties with other Black activists before being gunned down by assassins who were members of the NOI later in 1965.

In 1961, members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rode segregated buses in order to integrate interstate travel. These Black and white Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, where mobs beat them with bats and pipes in bus stations and firebombed their buses. A cautious Kennedy administration reluctantly intervened to protect the Freedom Riders with federal marshals, who were also victimized by violent white mobs.

Malcolm X was a charismatic speaker and gifted organizer. He argued that Black pride, identity, and independence were more important than integration with whites.

King was moved to act. He confronted segregation with the hope of exposing injustice and brutality against nonviolent protestors and arousing the conscience of the nation to achieve a just rule of law. The first planned civil rights campaign was initiated by SNCC and taken over mid-campaign by King and SCLC. It failed because Albany, Georgia’s Police Chief Laurie Pritchett studied King’s tactics and responded to the demonstrations with restraint. In 1963, King shifted the movement to Birmingham, Alabama, where Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed his officers to attack civil rights protestors with fire hoses and police dogs. Authorities arrested thousands, including many young people who joined the marches. King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” after his own arrest and provided the moral justification for the movement to break unjust laws. National and international audiences were shocked by the violent images shown in newspapers and on the television news. President Kennedy addressed the nation and asked, “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities . . . [If a Black person]cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” The president then submitted a civil rights bill to Congress.

In late August 1963, more than 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in solidarity for equal rights. From the Lincoln Memorial steps, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He stated, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson pushed his agenda through Congress. In the early summer of 1964, a 3-month filibuster by southern senators was finally defeated, and both houses passed the historical civil rights bill. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, banning segregation in public accommodations.

Activists in the civil rights movement then focused on campaigns for the right to vote. During the summer of 1964, several civil rights organizations combined their efforts during the “ Freedom Summer ” to register Blacks to vote with the help of young white college students. They endured terror and intimidation as dozens of churches and homes were burned and workers were killed, including an incident in which Black advocate James Chaney and two white students, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi.

In August 1963, peaceful protesters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to draw attention to the inequalities and indignities African Americans suffered 100 years after emancipation. Leaders of the march are shown in the image on the bottom, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the center.

That summer, Fannie Lou Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as civil rights delegates to replace the rival white delegation opposed to civil rights at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Hamer was a veteran of attempts to register other Blacks to vote and endured severe beatings for her efforts. A proposed compromise of giving two seats to the MFDP satisfied neither those delegates nor the white delegation, which walked out. Cracks were opening up in the Democratic electoral coalition over civil rights, especially in the South.

Fannie Lou Hamer testified about the violence she and others endured when trying to register to vote at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Her televised testimony exposed the realities of continued violence against Blacks trying to exercise their constitutional rights.

In early 1965, the SCLC and SNCC joined forces to register voters in Selma and draw attention to the fight for Black suffrage. On March 7, marchers planned to walk peacefully from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. However, mounted state troopers and police blocked the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then rampaged through the marchers, indiscriminately beating them. SNCC leader John Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and 5 women were clubbed unconscious. Seventy people were hospitalized for injuries during “Bloody Sunday.” The scenes again shocked television viewers and newspaper readers.

The images of state troopers, local police, and local people brutally attacking peaceful protestors on “Bloody Sunday” shocked people across the country and world. Two weeks later, protestors of all ages and races continued the protest. By the time they reached the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, their ranks had swelled to about 25,000 people.

Two days later, King led a symbolic march to the bridge but then turned around. Many younger and more militant activists were alienated and felt that King had sold out to white authorities. The tension revealed the widening division between older civil rights advocates and those younger, more radical supporters who were frustrated at the slow pace of change and the routine violence inflicted upon peaceful protesters. Nevertheless, starting on March 21, with the help of a federal judge who refused Governor George Wallace’s request to ban the march, Blacks triumphantly walked to Montgomery. On August 6, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act protecting the rights to register and vote after a Senate filibuster ended and the bill passed Congress.

The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not alter the fact that most Black Americans still suffered racism, were denied equal economic opportunities, and lived in segregated neighborhoods. While King and other leaders did seek to raise their issues among northerners, frustrations often boiled over into urban riots during the mid-1960s. Police brutality and other racial incidents often triggered days of violence in which hundreds were injured or killed. There were mass arrests and widespread property damage from arson and looting in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, and dozens of other cities. A presidential National Advisory Commission of Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report, which analyzed the causes of urban unrest, noting the impact of racism on the inequalities and injustices suffered by Black Americans.

Frustration among young Black Americans led to the rise of a more militant strain of advocacy. In 1966, activist James Meredith was on a solo march in Mississippi to raise awareness about Black voter registration when he was shot and wounded. Though Meredith recovered, this event typified the violence that led some young Black Americans to espouse a more military strain of advocacy. On June 16, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and members of the Black Panther Party continued Meredith’s march while he recovered from his wounds, chanting, “We want Black Power .” Black Power leaders and members of the Black Panther Party offered a different vision for equality and justice. They advocated self-reliance and self-empowerment, a celebration of Black culture, and armed self-defense. They used aggressive rhetoric to project a more radical strategy for racial progress, including sympathy for revolutionary socialism and rejection of capitalism. While its legacy is debated, the Black Power movement raised many important questions about the place of Black Americans in the United States, beyond the civil rights movement.

After World War II, Black Americans confronted the iniquities and indignities of segregation to end almost a century of Jim Crow. Undeterred, they turned the public’s eyes to the injustice they faced and called on the country to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and to continue the fight against inequality and discrimination.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What factors helped to create the modern civil rights movement?
• How was the quest for civil rights a combination of federal and local actions?
• What were the goals and methods of different activists and groups of the civil rights movement? Complete the table below to reference throughout your analysis of the primary source documents.

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124 Justice Research Topics & Essay Examples

📝 justice research papers examples, 👍 good justice essay topics to write about, 💡 essay ideas on justice, ❓ justice research questions.

• Criminal Acts and Justice in the United States Law essay sample: Race does not significantly affect the probability of committing criminal acts. Socio-economic factors are majorly responsible for crime prevalence in certain communities.
• Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice Law essay sample: It is safe to say that wrongful convictions are directly dependent on the attitudes of police officers and their probable misconduct.
• Criminal Justice System Fundamental Principles Law essay sample: Criminal procedures ensure that searches and seizures are reasonable so that individual rights were not infringed by law enforcers during the criminal justice process.
• Equal Protection Clause and DNA Evidence Use Law essay sample: Although separate of the Equal Protection Clause and DNA influence on the criminal justice and social justice systems is obvious, the way they are interconnected is way bigger.
• Criminal Justice System in the United States Law essay sample: This paper will focus on exploring the dual court system as well as the key philosophies of judging when it comes to dealing with criminal cases of different severity.
• Criminal Justice System: Racial Disparities and Inequality Law essay sample: The paper shows that racism and discrimination are acute problems of the American criminal justice system. It is certainly inhumane to make people suffer because of their race or ethnicity.
• The US Constitution's Influence on the Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land and the guide for all criminal law processes within the judicial system.
• A Criminal Justice Integration Project Law essay sample: This paper seeks to develop a criminal justice integration project that involves an analysis of major components of the criminal justice system.
• Criminal Justice System in USA. Law essay sample: Criminal law is a division of law that elucidates crimes, describes about their nature and defines available punishment for a criminal offense.
• The Juvenile Justice System in the U.S. Law essay sample: The society took initiative in creating policies and techniques to control and penalize the problematic children. Conceivably one of the most severe improvements included the curing of serious child criminal.
• Gender Issues in Criminal Justice Law essay sample: There is available research to indicate that there are gender biases within the criminal justice system. Transsexual people are more vulnerable to violence and discrimination.
• The History of Law Enforcement in US Law essay sample: Law enforcement agencies are an essential element of the US' criminal justice system. The US law enforcement history will be the focus of this paper.
• How Necessary a Juvenile Justice System? Law essay sample: Even though the juvenile justice system in the US has been in place for more than 100 years, questions about its necessity can still be heard among experts and enthusiasts.
• Parents’ Role in Youth Probation Law essay sample: Parents can play a crucial role in the juvenile justice system as studies suggest that the influence of parents on children's education contributes to the development of the behavior.
• Mafia and Italian Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: The criminal justice system of Italy has not succeeded in eliminating the Cosa Nostra because the mafia has never been as strong as it is at the moment in Italy.
• Organized Crime: Adversarial vs. Inquisitorial Models of Justice Law essay sample: Many nations have over time developed different ways of ensuring that they have a better way of compensating the victims of crime.
• The Role of Youth Conferences in the Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: This paper describes youth conferences as one way it is used to distract young offenders from the traditional criminal justice system.
• Probation and Parole in Criminal Law Law essay sample: The criminal justice system is currently doing everything in its power to ensure that jails are decongested and that those convicted get a fair trial and another chance.
• Case Management in Juvenile Justice Law essay sample: In juvenile justice, case management provides the support that each juvenile requires to maximize their opportunities to choose positive alternatives to offending behavior.
• Criminal Justice System. Controls in Criminal Law Law essay sample: Criminal justice is a broad term that encompasses different aspects of justice in crime. It is society’s instrument in maintaining social control.
• Juvenile Justice Systems and Processes Law essay sample: This paper gives an analysis of the juvenile and adult courts giving insights into the similarities and differences between them, the aspects of the juvenile justice system.
• Criminal Justice System Levels Law essay sample: Every kind of crime consists of a certain element whose existence should be proved by the government for a conviction to be given by a court of law.
• What Justice Means Law essay sample: Justice is quite an elusive term, for example, justice could imply different things to different individuals within the same society.
• Disparity in Criminal Justice System With Sentencing Law essay sample: In the paper, some variants of eliminating the causes of discrimination are going to be considered. A goal of criminal sanctions is to decrease the likelihood of the accident occurring.
• Australian Practices and Japanese Practices of Justice System Law essay sample: This paper compares and contrasts the Australian practices of the criminal justice system with the Japanese practices of the criminal justice system.
• Retributive Justice: The Case of Julio Blanco Garcia Law essay sample: It is possible to consider a case of a murderer to see that retributive justice is justified in certain cases. Thus, the paper reviews the case of Julio Blanco Garcia.
• Separation of Powers in Criminal Justice System to Safeguard Suspects’ Rights Law essay sample: Division of powers between the institutions is an important feature of the criminal justice system in democratic societies.
• Leadership in the Criminal Justice Organization Law essay sample: In a criminal justice organization, the charismatic leader would be employed in situations that require enthusiasm, especially in rallying support for a certain cause.
• Antonin Scalia, an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Law essay sample: Scalia was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1986 to 2016, his career life began at an international law firm located in Cleveland.
• Components of Criminal Justice System: Law Enforcement Law essay sample: This study concentrates on the system of criminal justice in the United States of America as it has the best system of study in the world.
• Criminal Justice Trends Evaluation Law essay sample: The criminal justices trends have changed over time. The changes have been influenced by various factors that affect society.
• Search and Seizure Under Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: The main focus of the study is the legal perspective of law enforcement agencies’ powers of search and seizure under criminal justice systems.
• The Criminal Justice System: Racial Inequalities Law essay sample: This research paper will discuss causes and impacts of racial inequalities in the Criminal Justice System to the society.
• Management of Criminal Justice Agencies Law essay sample: Police leaders can take several actions to limit the number of job actions by uniformed officers. They can assess the environment and decide on a course of action to be implemented.
• The Incorporation of the Jury Within the Justice System Law essay sample: In this role, the practice of involving a jury in court and different views on the appropriateness of its functioning in the framework of legal proceedings are discussed.
• Cultural Diversity in Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: The research proposal demonstrates the role race plays in the criminal justice system and helps to understand issues of cultural diversity that majorities may be familiar with.
• Criminal Justice System: Fair or Efficient Law essay sample: The purpose of this article is to critically assess whether it is possible to have a criminal justice system that is both fair and efficient.
• Ethical Leadership in Criminal Justice Law essay sample: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of ethical leadership in criminal justice and review the traits, which are the most important to an ethical leader.
• Significance of Parole and Probation in the U.S. Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: Parole and probation are types of sentencing that are used in the United States. Parole involves the release of an offender before serving their full sentence in jail.
• Juvenile Justice and Adult Criminal Justice Systems Law essay sample: This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between juvenile justice organizations and the adult criminal justice system.
• Juvenile Justice System and Practices in the US Law essay sample: This work will compare juvenile justice to that of adults and explain how the policing, court, and especially correction systems will handle the youths and affect their lives.
• Aspects of Juvenile Justice Process Law essay sample: The current paper discusses the aspects of the juvenile justice process. It includes some steps and comparisons with the adult court system.
• The Problem of Imprisonment Injustice in the USA Law essay sample: The United States has the second-highest incarceration rate globally, after China, despite a slight decline over the past two decades.
• Juvenile Restorative Justice Programs Analysis Law essay sample: Such restorative justice programs as arbitration and mediation among juvenile offenders lack the desirable effectiveness, despite the improved perception of fairness.
• Recidivism and Retributive Justice Law essay sample: Law and order are among the most significant aspects that lead to the stability of the country. The paper discusses recidivism and retributive justice.
• Behavior Analysis of Supervision of Criminal Justice Entity Law essay sample: The paper describes the case where Sergeant Maynard is a young police supervisor who is tasked to practice adequate police supervision.
• The Influence of Society on Morality and Justice Law essay sample: The main purpose of the work is to compare the influence of public opinion and several current laws on the rights of children and young people in Scotland.
• Court System and Alternative Dispute Resolution Law essay sample: The article argues courts and judges must dispense justice without fear or favor; they must be fair, just, and unbiased.
• Racial Inequality and Rehabilitation in Criminal Justice Law essay sample: Studies of victimization and offending patterns and societal factors that underpin and explain race/ethnic variations in statistics on major violent crimes have received much attention.
• Media’s Inclusive Representation of Criminal Justice Law essay sample: The question of whether the media represents the Criminal Justice System exclusively as a successful institution is answered through the discussion in this paper.
• Criminal Justice: Charles Manson, the Serial Killer Law essay sample: The convicted serial murderer Charles Manson inspired a cult of youthful runaways. These individuals clung to his every word and engaged in the 1969 murders.
• Criminal Justice System Reform in the US Law essay sample: The government created the criminal justice system to punish undesirable conduct in individuals and compensate or reimburse the affected victims.
• The Criminal Justice Process in English and Welsh Law essay sample: The sources of criminal procedural law in England and Wales are, first of all, legislative acts, which for the most part, simultaneously regulate the issues of the judiciary.
• Victim Involvement and Restorative Justice Law essay sample: Although there are some limitations related to victimization, restorative justice provides a promising alternative to regular retributive justice.
• Discrimination of Minority Population in the Criminal Justice System Law essay sample: The criminal justice system in the United States tends to express discrimination and disparities toward minority populations.
• Attorney-Client Privilege: The Flaw in Our Justice System
• Climate and the Global Climate Justice Movement
• Criminal Justice Degree Programs Analysis
• First Nation People and Justice in Canada
• Adult Criminal Justice System of North Carolina
• Incorporating Restorative and Community Justice Into American Sentencing
• Factors Affecting the Criminal Justice System
• The Criminal Justice System of the United States Constitution
• Black Studies Movement for Human Justice
• Determinate Sentencing and the Criminal Justice System
• Decision Making and Organizational Justice
• Abolitionism and the Criminal Justice System
• Attitudes Toward the Juvenile Justice System
• Catholic Beliefs About Justice, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation
• Capitalism: Ethical Issues Regarding Economic Justice
• Developing Leaders for Social Justice
• Female Genital Mutilation, Women, and Global Justice
• Discrimination Throughout the Criminal Justice System Criminology
• Attitude Towards Crime Justice Management
• Eight Decades of the Study of Miscarriages of Justice
• Fair and Square: The Four Sides of Distributive Justice
• Basic and Applied Approaches to Criminal Justice
• Canadian Justice: The Youth Criminal Justice Act
• Elements That Impact the Criminal Justice System
• Final Project: Justice System Position
• Effective Practice During the Social Justice System
• Balancing Criminal Justice and Personal Freedom
• Environmental Justice and the Civil Rights Movement
• Black Reparation: Social Justice Through the Visibility of the Black
• Getting Justice for the Criminal Justice System
• Equal Justice and Cultural Diversity for Students
• Organizational Behavior and Criminal Justice Agencies
• Indigenous People and the Criminal Justice System
• Homeland Security and Criminal Justice Administration
• Elder Self Neglect and Social Justice
• Debate Over Capital Punishment in the Justice System
• Income Disparity and Social Justice Based on Graph
• Aboriginal People and the Criminal Justice System
• The Exclusionary Rule: Redefining the Criminal Justice System
• Environmental Justice and Its Effects on the Environment
• Did William Marbury Have a Right to the Commission as Justice of Peace?
• Does Democracy Engender Justice?
• Does Justice Exist Throughout Today’s Society?
• What Does the Future Hold for the Criminal Justice System?
• What Does the Phrase ‘Social Justice’ Mean?
• How Does Interpersonal Justice Affect Outside DirectorsТ Governance Behavior?
• What Are the Three Most Challenging Issues of Criminal Justice?
• What Are the Major Components of the Criminal Justice System?
• Can Amnesties and International Justice Be Reconcile?
• How Do Aristotle’s Ideas on Justice Influence the American Judicial System?
• Why Are Justice and Integrity Problematic for Utilitarianism?
• How Does the Australian Criminal Justice System Respond to White Collar?
• Does the Legal System Help Achieve Justice?
• How Does the Capability Approach View Justice?
• How Does the Criminal Justice System Respond to Illicit Drugs Assignment?
• Does Justice Require That People Are Given What They Deserve?
• Has the European Court of Justice Challenged Member State Sovereignty in Nationality Law?
• What Does Teaching for Social Justice Mean for Teachers?
• What Are Effective Writing Principles for Criminal Justice?
• How Does the Brain Malfunctions Affect the Justice System?
• Does Wage Justice Hamper Creativity?
• Does Revenge Does Not Bring True Justice?
• How Does Socrates Show That Justice Is Not Possible in the City?
• What Are the Main Principles of Restorative Justice?
• How Does Prejudice Affect Justice?
• Have Stiff Drug Laws Helped or Hurt the Criminal Justice System?
• How Does Society Shape the Experiences of the Criminal Justice?
• Does the Criminal Justice System Work?
• How Can Our Government Provide Liberty and Justice for All?

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Principles and Values in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Andrew Ashworth

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Celebrating the scholarship of Andrew Ashworth, Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford, this book explores questions of principle and value in criminal law and criminal justice. Internationally renowned for elaborating a body of principles and values that should underpin criminalization, the criminal process, and sentencing, Ashworth's contribution to the field over forty years of scholarship has been immense. Advancing his project of exploring normative issues at the heart of criminal law and criminal justice, the chapters examine the important and fascinating debates in which Ashworth's influence has been greatest. The chapters fall into three distinct but related areas, reflecting Ashworth's primary spheres of influence. Those in Part 1 address the import and role of principles in the development of a just criminal law, with contributions focusing upon core tenets such as the presumption of innocence, fairness, accountability, the principles of criminal liability, and the grounds for defences. Part 2 addresses questions of human rights and due process protections in both domestic and international law. In Part 3 the chapters are addressed to core issues in sentencing and punishment: they explore questions of equality, proportionality, adherence to the rule of law, the totality principle (in respect of multiple offences), wrongful acquittals, and unduly lenient sentences. Together they demonstrate how important Ashworth's work has been in shaping how we think about criminal law and criminal justice, and make their own invaluable contribution to contemporary discussions of criminalization and punishment.

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2nd GCRCJS Criminal Law Essay Writing Competition on Evaluating the Shifting Features of India’s Criminal Justice System by GNLU: Submit by Sep 5

• Essay Competitions Opportunities
• September 4, 2024

GCRCJS is pleased to organize its 2nd GCRCJS Criminal Law Essay Writing Competition on the theme “Evaluating the Shifting Features of India’s Criminal Justice System After 78 Years of Independence” and cordially invites submissions for the same.

About GNLU Centre for Research in Criminal Justice Sciences

Recognizing that a comprehensive appreciation of the technicalities, complexities and patterns of criminal law is indispensable for realizing the goals of the law, Gujarat National Law University established GCRCJS in 2019. It is a Centre dedicated to carrying out research in the niche area of Criminal Law. The Centre provides a platform for a holistic research environment and aims to further knowledge and academic discussions about the multifaceted dimensions of criminal science.

About the Competition

The competition aims to provide a platform for students in the fields of Law, Criminology, Public Administration, Sociology, and related fields to engage with critical issues facing India’s criminal justice system.

The main theme of the Competition is Evaluating the Shifting Features of India’s Criminal Justice System After 78 Years of Independence.

The competition will focus on the following sub-themes:

• Analyzing the Three New Criminal Laws
• Emergence of White-Collar Crime
• Functioning of Special Investigation Agencies
• Introduction of New Crimes
• The Continuance of Colonial Hierarchy in the Criminal Justice System
• Emergence of New Criminal Activities through Cyberspace
• The Rise of State Policing
• The Criminal Justice Administration: Studying the Criminal Bureaucracy
• Participants are encouraged to strictly adhere to the competition themes.
• The name of the Author(s) or any other form of identification must not be mentioned in the Essay.
• Co-authorship is limited to a maximum of two (2) authors.
• Word limit: 1500-2000 words, excluding the Footnotes.
• Font style – Times New Roman.
• Font size – 14 for Headings, 12 for Body, 10 for Footnotes.
• Line Spacing – 1.5 for Body, 1.0 for Footnotes.
• Citation Style – OSCOLA.
• Margins – 1 inch (i.e., 2.54 cm) on each side.
• Note: Speaking footnotes are allowed in the submissions but are not mandatory.
• If included, speaking footnotes should be limited to a maximum of 50 words each.
• The plagiarism limit is 10% following UGC Guidelines.
• Use of Artificial Intelligence for submissions is strictly prohibited and highly discouraged.

All participants will receive a Certificate of Participation.

The top three entries will be published on the GCRCJS Crime & Justice Blog along with a Certificate of Merit.

The top three entries will receive the following cash prizes:

• 1st Prize: ₹5,000
• 2nd Prize: ₹3,000
• 3rd Prize: ₹2,000

Important Date

Submission Deadline: 25th September 2024.

Submission Procedure

Participants must submit their essays through the provided Google Form link only. The name of the document should be in the format: <br /> Participants may submit the essay in .doc or .docx format here: Submission Link</p>

Contact Information

Participants may reach out to us at [email protected] . For any further queries or assistance, please contact:

• Ms. Simran Srivastava, Student Convenor, +91 98078 51552
• Mr. Bhanupratap Singh Rathore, Student Convenor, +91 96643 38656
• Mr. Vatshal Raval, Student Co-Convener, +91 92653 84215
• Mr. Shivam Agrawal, Student Co-Convener, +91 94130 29413
• Ms. Durlabhya Singh, Student Co-Secretary, +91 78500 73174

The brochure is here .

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Florida Man Sentenced for Assaulting Law Enforcement During Jan. 6 Capitol Breach

            WASHINGTON— A Florida man was sentenced to prison today after he previously pled guilty to assaulting law enforcement during the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election.

            Bryan Roger Bishop, 52, of Marathon, Florida, was sentenced to 45 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release, and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly. Bishop pleaded guilty to a single count of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers on April 30, 2024.

            According to court documents, on Jan. 6, 2021, by approximately 2:00 p.m., a crowd of rioters had breached various barriers that had been erected on the west side of the U.S. Capitol building and were attempting to overwhelm police officers positioned there. At approximately 2:02 p.m., Bishop emerged from the crowd and aimed and sprayed a chemical irritant canister at the line of police officers.

            Court documents say that Bishop sprayed a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer directly in the face with an orange-colored chemical irritant and then sprayed a second MPD officer by aiming the spray at an upward angle in order to spray under the officer’s face shield.

            After spraying the officers on the West Plaza, Bishop entered the U.S. Capitol building at approximately 2:39 p.m. Inside, Bishop walked throughout various rooms, including the Rotunda, Statuary Hall, and the Statuary Hall Connector. After approximately 17 minutes, Bishop exited the Capitol building at approximately 2:56 p.m.

            The FBI arrested Bishop on Aug. 8, 2023, in Florida.

            The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section prosecuted this case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida provided valuable assistance.

            This case was investigated by the FBI’s Miami, San Antonio, and Washington Field Offices, which identified Bishop as BOLO (“Be on the Look Out”) #466 on its seeking information photos.

           In the 43 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,488 individuals have been charged in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including nearly 550 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, a felony. The investigation remains ongoing.

            Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or visit tips.fbi.gov.

[email protected]

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Joseph Stalin’ Show Trials: A Short Summary

Joseph Stalin’s show trials were common during his political repressions, such as the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period (1937–38). The Soviet authorities staged the actual trials meticulously.

The trials were held against Stalin’s political enemies, such as the Trotskyists and those involved with the Right Opposition of the Communist Party. The trials were shams that led to the execution of most defendants. Every surviving member of the Lenin-era part was tried, and almost every important Bolshevik from the Revolution was executed. Over 1,100 delegates to the party congress in 1934 were arrested.  The killings were part of Stalin’s Great Purge, in which opportunists and Bolshevik cadres from the time of the Russian Revolution who could rally opposition to Joseph Stalin were killed. He did so at a time of growing discontent in the 1930s for his mismanagement of the Soviet economy, leading to mass famines during periods of rapid and poorly executed industrialization and farm collectivization.

Prominent Americans could even be found to defend Stalin show trials, a spectacle of political theater so transparent that it would have taken genuine effort not to see through it. In order to terrorize Communist Party members into absolute submission and at the same time eliminate potential rivals, Stalin put on a series of high-profile trials in which prominent Communists confessed to treachery against the Soviet Union. In some cases, people were coaxed into making these confessions by threats against their families if they refused. One by one some of the most loyal Communists , dating back to the days of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, solemnly admitted to counterrevolutionary activity. George Orwell could hardly have improved on this eerie and macabre spectacle.

Yet there were those on the American Left who supported Stalin and vouched for the authenticity of the trials. In 1938, some 150 Americans prominent in the entertainment industry signed a statement in support of the verdicts reached in “the recent Moscow trials.” According to the expert opinion of these Broadway stars and assorted glitterati, the trials had “by sheer weight of evidence established a clear presumption of the guilt of the defendants.” As if this weren’t bad enough, people who knew better said the same thing. The U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies , insisted to the American government that the trials were genuine, a claim he stood by in his 1941 book Mission to Moscow. He told the New Republic, “We see no reason to take the trial at other than its face value.” The proceedings, he said, had uncovered the “virus of a conspiracy to overthrow the [Soviet] government.” Duranty, for his part, described it as “unthinkable” that Stalin could have sentenced his friends to death “unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming,” and wrote of his conviction that “the confessions are true.”A

After Stalin’s death, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev repudiated the trials in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party:

The commission has become acquainted with a large quantity of materials in the NKVD archives and with other documents and has established many facts pertaining to the fabrication of cases against Communists, to glaring abuses of Socialist legality which resulted in the death of innocent people. It became apparent that many party, Government and economic activists who were branded in 1937–38 as ‘enemies,’ were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers, etc., but were always honest Communists … They were only so stigmatized and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves (at the order of the investigative judges – falsifiers) with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes.

Additional Resources About Cold War

The cold war timeline, what was the iron curtain and how did it collapse, the origins of the cold war timeline, cold war detente — us/soviet enmity cools, cite this article.

• How Much Can One Individual Alter History? More and Less...
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Nvidia Denies It Was Subpoenaed In Justice Department Antitrust Probe

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An Nvidia spokesperson said Wednesday the company was not subpoenaed by the Justice Department, contrasting a report Tuesday that the company received a subpoena for information as part of an ongoing antitrust investigation into some of the technology sector’s biggest players.

Nvidia stock closed down more than 9% Tuesday. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via ... [+] Getty Images)

Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo told Forbes the company inquired with the Justice Department and has “not been subpoenaed,” noting Nvidia is “happy to answer any questions regulators may have about our business.”

Bloomberg reported Tuesday a subpoena was sent to Nvidia and other unnamed technology companies, citing unnamed people familiar with the investigation and reporting the Justice Department’s San Francisco office was spearheading the probe.

The outlet reported Wednesday, citing an unnamed source, that Nvidia received “a civil investigative demand, which is commonly referred to as a subpoena,” requesting details about its business and its RunAI acquisition.

Antitrust officials believe Nvidia may be making it more difficult for buyers to switch to other chip suppliers while penalizing those that do not exclusively purchase their AI chips, Bloomberg reported—a concern previously shared among those in the chipmaking industry, according to The New York Times .

The investigation into Nvidia has a focus on the company’s $700 million acquisition of AI management firm RunAI as regulators are concerned the deal makes finding alternatives to Nvidia chips difficult, according to Bloomberg.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment.

Get Forbes Breaking News Text Alerts : We’re launching text message alerts so you'll always know the biggest stories shaping the day’s headlines. Text “Alerts” to (201) 335-0739 or sign up here.

Nvidia shares closed down 9.5% on Tuesday at $108, later dropping more than 1.5% in after-hours trading. The chip designer has been in a slump since reporting record-setting earnings last week that failed to meet investors’ loftiest expectations. Shares dropped another 1.7% on Wednesday, and are now down more than 15% in the past week. However, the tech company’s stock is still well up on the year after starting January at $48.17 per share.

Key Background

Nvidia is one of multiple tech giants involved in the Justice Department investigation, which is also looking into Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI . The Nvidia probe comes as the company is estimated to control between 70% and 95% of the market for AI chips, according to CNBC . The company’s largest and most notable customers include Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google parent company Alphabet, with Microsoft and Meta allocating 40% of their budgets to Nvidia’s hardware, Bloomberg reported. Regulators have not filed a formal complaint against Nvidia, which also dealt with Justice Department subpoenas in 2006 over an antitrust investigation into its graphics chips.

Further Reading

U.S. Regulators Are Looking Into Microsoft, Nvidia And OpenAI (Forbes)

Nvidia’s French Offices Raided Over Antitrust Concerns, Report Says (Forbes)

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