essays about justice

Essays About Justice: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

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

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

5 Essay Examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 Prompts for Essays About Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Judiciary — Justice

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.

Justice in Antigone: Divine Law Versus Human Authority

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Lather and Nothing Else Summary

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Poverty and The Existing Gap Between The Rich and Poor

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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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123 Justice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Justice is a fundamental concept in society that ensures fairness and equality for all individuals. It is essential for maintaining order and upholding the rights of every person. When it comes to writing essays on justice, there are countless topics to explore. Here are 123 justice essay topic ideas and examples to help you get started:

• The importance of justice in society
• The role of the justice system in maintaining social order
• The impact of social injustice on marginalized communities
• The relationship between justice and equality
• The concept of restorative justice in criminal cases
• The effectiveness of the juvenile justice system
• The challenges of achieving justice in a diverse society
• The role of technology in promoting justice
• The ethical implications of capital punishment
• The impact of racial bias in the criminal justice system
• The role of prosecutors in ensuring justice for victims
• The influence of media on public perceptions of justice
• The role of juries in the justice system
• The impact of poverty on access to justice
• The role of non-governmental organizations in promoting justice
• The challenges of implementing justice in developing countries
• The role of international law in promoting global justice
• The impact of gender bias in the justice system
• The relationship between justice and human rights
• The role of lawyers in ensuring justice for their clients
• The impact of mental health on the justice system
• The role of community policing in promoting justice
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of sexual assault
• The impact of corruption on the justice system
• The role of education in promoting justice
• The relationship between justice and democracy
• The impact of social media on the justice system
• The challenges of achieving justice for undocumented immigrants
• The role of the judiciary in interpreting and enforcing justice
• The impact of mass incarceration on communities of color
• The role of bystanders in promoting justice
• The challenges of achieving justice for individuals with disabilities
• The impact of technology on the criminal justice system
• The role of forensic science in solving crimes and delivering justice
• The relationship between justice and forgiveness
• The impact of mandatory minimum sentencing laws on justice
• The role of restorative justice in cases of domestic violence
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of human trafficking
• The impact of political corruption on the justice system
• The role of international courts in promoting justice
• The relationship between justice and retribution
• The impact of mental illness on access to justice
• The role of social workers in promoting justice for vulnerable populations
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of police brutality
• The impact of surveillance technology on civil liberties and justice
• The role of community organizations in promoting social justice
• The relationship between justice and mercy
• The impact of mandatory drug sentencing laws on justice
• The role of victim advocates in promoting justice for survivors of crime
• The challenges of achieving justice for LGBTQ individuals
• The impact of mass surveillance on privacy and justice
• The role of faith-based organizations in promoting justice
• The relationship between justice and accountability
• The impact of mandatory arbitration clauses on access to justice
• The role of prosecutors in addressing systemic racism in the justice system
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of environmental crimes
• The impact of mandatory minimum sentencing laws on racial disparities in the justice system
• The role of defense attorneys in ensuring justice for their clients
• The relationship between justice and reconciliation
• The impact of technology on the privacy rights of individuals and access to justice
• The role of community organizations in promoting restorative justice
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of elder abuse
• The impact of mandatory drug sentencing laws on overcrowding in prisons
• The role of mental health professionals in promoting justice for individuals with mental illness
• The relationship between justice and social change
• The impact of mandatory arbitration clauses on consumer rights and access to justice
• The role of prosecutors in addressing racial bias in the criminal justice system
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of human rights abuses
• The impact of mandatory minimum sentencing laws on the juvenile justice system
• The role of defense attorneys in ensuring justice for juvenile offenders
• The relationship between justice and forgiveness in cases of juvenile offenders
• The impact of technology on the legal rights of juveniles and access to justice
• The role of community organizations in promoting justice for juvenile offenders
• The challenges of achieving justice for victims of juvenile offenders
• The impact of mandatory drug sentencing laws on racial disparities in the juvenile justice system
• The role of mental health professionals in promoting justice for juvenile offenders
• The relationship between justice and social change in cases of juvenile offenders
• The impact of mandatory arbitration clauses on juvenile rights and access to justice
• The role of prosecutors in addressing racial bias in the juvenile justice system
• The impact of mandatory minimum sentencing laws on the rights of juvenile offenders
• The role of defense attorneys in ensuring justice for juvenile victims
• The impact of technology on the legal rights of juvenile offenders and access to justice

These are just a few examples of the many justice essay topics that you could explore in your writing. Whether you are interested in criminal justice, social justice, restorative justice, or any other aspect of this important concept, there is a wealth of material to draw from. By choosing a topic that resonates with you, you can create a powerful and impactful essay that sheds light on the complexities of justice in our society.

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Justice for All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Content

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

Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

Follow BI and the Hyper-Polarization Discussion on BI's New Substack Newsletter .

Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Michelle Maiese

(Originally published July 2003, updated by Heidi Burgess June 2013 and again in April, 2017 and yet again in July, 2020.)  

Current Implications

You can tell by the number of times I have updated this essay, that the notion of "justice" keeps on coming up in the news. In the "Core Concepts" unit of our Conflict Fundamentals Massive Open Online Seminar (MOOS), we introduced the notion of "reconciliation" and examined John Paul Lederach's notion that reconciliation occurs through the meeting of 'peace, justice, truth, and mercy." But as becomes very clear in his exercise exploring these ideas, none of them are easy to understand.   More...

Justice Versus Fairness

In the context of conflict, the terms 'justice' and 'fairness' are often used interchangeably.

Taken in its broader sense, justice is action in accordance with the requirements of some law.[1] Some maintain that justice stems from God's will or command, while others believe that justice is inherent in nature itself. Still others believe that justice consists of rules common to all humanity that emerge out of some sort of consensus. This sort of justice is often thought of as something higher than a society's legal system. It is in those cases where an action seems to violate some universal rule of conduct that we are likely to call it "unjust."

In its narrower sense, justice is fairness. It is action that pays due regard to the proper interests, property, and safety of one's fellows.[2] While justice in the broader sense is often thought of as transcendental, justice as fairness is more context-bound. Parties concerned with fairness typically strive to work out something comfortable and adopt procedures that resemble rules of a game. They work to ensure that people receive their "fair share" of benefits and burdens and adhere to a system of "fair play."

The principles of justice and fairness can be thought of as rules of "fair play" for issues of social justice. Whether they turn out to be grounded in universal laws or ones that are more context-bound, these principles determine the way in which the various types of justice are carried out. For example, principles of distributive justice determine what counts as a "fair share" of particular good, while principles of retributive or restorative justice shape our response to activity that violates a society's rules of "fair play." Social justice requires both that the rules be fair, and also that people play by the rules.

People often frame justice issues in terms of fairness and invoke principles of justice and fairness to explain their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the organizations they are part of, as well as their state or government.[3] They want institutions to treat them fairly and to operate according to fair rules. What constitutes fair treatment and fair rules is often expressed by a variety of justice principles.

Deserts, Equity, Equality, and Need

The principles of equity, equality, and need are most relevant in the context of distributive justice , but might play a role in a variety of social justice issues.[4] These principles all appeal to the notion of desert, the idea that fair treatment is a matter of giving people what they deserve. In general, people deserve to be rewarded for their effort and productivity, punished for their transgressions, treated as equal persons, and have their basic needs met. However, because these principles may come into conflict, it is often difficult to achieve all of these goals simultaneously.

According to the principle of equity, a fair economic system is one that distributes goods to individuals in proportion to their input. While input typically comes in the form of productivity, ability or talent might also play a role. People who produce more or better products...either by working harder, or by being more talented, this argument goes, should be paid more for their efforts than should people who produce less. Note that this sort of distribution may not succeed in meeting the needs of all members of society.

In addition, the idea that justice requires the unequal treatment of unequals is in tension with the principle of equality. This principle of egalitarianism suggests that the fairest allocation is one that distributes benefits and burdens equally among all parties. If there are profits of $100,000, and 10 people in the company, the principle of equality would suggest that everyone would get $10,000. This principle, however, ignores differences in effort, talent, and productivity. Also, because people have different needs, an equal initial distribution may not result in an equal outcome.

A principle of need, on the other hand, proposes that we strive for an equal outcome in which all society or group members get what they need. Thus poor people would get more money, and richer people would get less. This principle is sometimes criticized because it does not recognize differences in productive contributions or distinguish between real needs and purported needs.

Some have suggested that equity, equality, and need are not principles adopted for their own sake, but rather ones endorsed to advance some social goal.[5] For example, while equity tends to foster productivity, principles of equality and need tend to stress the importance of positive interpersonal relationships and a sense of belonging among society members.

Impartiality, Consistency, Standing, and Trust

Principles of justice and fairness are also central to procedural , retributive, and restorative justice. Such principles are supposed to ensure procedures that generate unbiased, consistent, and reliable decisions. Here the focus is on carrying out set rules in a fair manner so that a just outcome might be reached. Fair procedures are central to the legitimacy of decisions reached and individuals' acceptance of those decisions.

To ensure fair procedures, both in the context of legal proceedings, as well as in negotiation and mediation, the third party carrying out those procedures must be impartial. This means they must make an honest, unbiased decision based on appropriate information.[6] For example, judges should be impartial, and facilitators should not exhibit any prejudice that gives one party unfair advantages. The rules themselves should also be impartial so that they do not favor some people over others from the outset. 

An unbiased, universally applied procedure, whether it serves to distribute wealth or deliver decisions, can ensure impartiality as well as consistency. The principle of consistency proposes that "the distinction of some versus others should reflect genuine aspects of personal identity rather than extraneous features of the differentiating mechanism itself."[7] In other words, the institutional mechanism in question should treat like cases alike and ensure a level playing field for all parties.

The principle of standing suggests that people value their membership in a group and that societal institutions and decision-making procedures should affirm their status as members.[8] For example, it might follow from this principle that all stakeholders should have a voice in the decision-making process. In particular, disadvantaged members of a group or society should be empowered and given an opportunity to be heard. When decision-making procedures treat people with respect and dignity, they feel affirmed. A central premise of restorative justice , for example, is that those directly affected by the offense should have a voice and representation in the decision-making process regarding the aftermath of the offense--be it punishment and/or restitution.

Related to issues of respect and dignity is the principle of trust. One measure of fairness is whether society members believe that authorities are concerned with their well being and needs. People's judgments of procedural fairness result from perceptions that they have been treated "honestly, openly, and with consideration."[9] If they believe that the authority took their viewpoints into account and tried to treat them fairly, they are more likely to support and engage in the broader social system.

What is So Important about the Principles of Justice

It may seem to be a simple matter of common sense that justice is central to any well-functioning society. However, the question of what justice is, exactly, and how it is achieved are more difficult matters. The principles of justice and fairness point to ideas of fair treatment and "fair play" that should govern all modes of exchange and interaction in a society. They serve as guidelines for carrying out justice.

Not surprisingly, each of the principles of justice and fairness can be applied in a variety of contexts. For example, the principle of desert applies not only to the distribution of wealth, but also to the distribution costs and of punishments. "Environmental justice" is a relatively new term that examines and challenges the social tendency to site noxious facilities (such as landfills or polluting industries) in poor areas, but not affluent areas.  An unjust distribution of punishments is suggested by the statistics that people of color are disproportionately represented in prisons and on death row. (In 2012, people of color made up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, but accounted for 60 percent of those imprisoned.) [10]  Likewise, the principles of impartiality and consistency might apply to both an economic system and a decision-making body. And the principle of need plays a central role in both distributive and restorative justice.

In addition, we can also understand conflict in terms of tension that arises between the different justice principles. Conflict about what is just might be expressed as conflict about which principle of justice should be applied in a given situation or how that principle should be implemented.[11]  The ways of thinking about justice can have conflicting implications, leading to disputes about fairness. For example, some believe that an equitable distribution is the most fair, while others insist that a society's assets should be allocated according to need. A conflict may thus arise surrounding whether to base an economic system on productivity (those who work hardest should earn the most), identity (the rich are "job makers" and thus should get richer) or social welfare (the poor need help more, so the rich should get taxed to help raise the income of the poor). Similarly, some believe that those who violate the rights of others should receive their just deserts (paying a fine or going to prison), while others believe that our focus should be on the needs of victims and offenders (which can be protected through a restorative justice system). 

When principles of justice operate ineffectively or not at all, confidence in and organization's or the society's institutions may be undermined. Citizens or group members may feel alienated and withdraw their commitment to those "unjust" institutions. Or, they may rebel or begin a revolution in order to create new institutions.  This was the essence of the "Arab Spring" uprisings that began in 2010 and continue today (2013); it is also the essence of uprisings that have occurred off and on (though with much less intensity and violence) in Europe over the same time period.  If justice principles are applied effectively, on the other hand, organizations and societies will tend to be more stable and its members will feel satisfied and secure.

You can tell by the number of times I have updated this essay, that the notion of "justice" keeps on coming up in the news. In the "Core Concepts" unit of our Conflict Fundamentals Massive Open Online Seminar (MOOS), we introduced the notion of "reconciliation" and examined John Paul Lederach's notion that reconciliation occurs through the meeting of 'peace, justice, truth, and mercy." But as becomes very clear in his exercise exploring these ideas, none of them are easy to understand.  Justice, perhaps, is the most difficult.  

Justice is often taken to mean "fairness." But fairness to whom? Determined by whom? In Western cultures, "justice" is usually seen as "just deserts"—or getting what you deserve. If you break a law, you should be punished.  If you work hard, you should be rewarded.  Eastern cultures are more likely to embrace the notion of restorative justice, or restoring order to relationships, rather than punishment for misdeeds.

Different understandings of the meaning of justice underlie a lot of the disagreements we see in the United States right now regarding topics such as immigration, taxes, and health care. In the summer of 2020, the focus is on race.  What is "fair?" "Who should get what, and why?"  "Who should pay for it?" "What should happen when people break the law (for instance, enter or stay in the US illegally)? What should happen when police break the law?  Who has a voice? Who doesn't?

Understanding the different definitions of justice is a start to sorting out what you think about these questions—and what is likely to create the outcomes you want and need.

-- Heidi Burgess. July, 2020.

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[1] James. W. Vice, "Neutrality, Justice, and Fairness," (Loyola University Chicago, 1997).

[2] Nicholas Rescher, Distributive Justice . (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, Inc., 1982), 5. < http://books.google.com/books?id=KCm4QgAACAAJ >. See also Rescher's Fairness: Theory & Practice of Distributive Justice (Transaction Publishers, 2002). < http://www.amazon.com/Fairness-Theory-Practice-Distributive-Justice/dp/0765801108 >.

[3] Tom R. Tyler and Maura A. Belliveau, "Tradeoffs in Justice Principles: Definitions of Fairness," in Conflict, Cooperation, and Justice , ed. Barbara B. Bunker and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers, 1995), 291. < http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Cooperation-Justice-Inspired-Deutsch/dp/0787900699 >.

[4] For a discussion of justice in a recent, global context, see: Chris Armstrong, Global Distributive Justice: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2012). < http://books.google.com/books?id=LJU0djAZ1osC >.

[5] Robert Folger, Blair H. Sheppard, and Robert T. Buttram, "Equity, Equality, and Need: Three Faces of Social Justice," in Conflict, Cooperation, and Justice , ed. Barbara B. Bunker and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers, 1995), 262. < http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Cooperation-Justice-Inspired-Deutsch/dp/0787900699 >.

[6] Folger, Sheppard, and Buttram, 272.

[7] Folger, Sheppard, and Buttram, 272.

[8] Folger, Sheppard, and Buttram, 273.

[9] Tyler and Belliveau, 297.

[10] Kerby, "The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States: A Look at the Racial Disparities Inherent in Our Nation’s Criminal-Justice System." Center for American Progress.  Published March 13, 2012.  Accessed June 4, 2013 at  http://bit.ly/PMeeAG.

[11] Morton Deutsch, "Justice and Conflict," in The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice , ed. Morton Deutsch and Peter Coleman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, Inc., 2000), 54. More recent edition (2011) available here .

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

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Global Justice

On common accounts, we have a state of justice when everyone has their due. The study of justice has been concerned with what we owe one another, what obligations we might have to treat each other fairly in a range of domains, including over distributive and recognitional matters. Contemporary political philosophers had focused their theorizing about justice almost exclusively within the state, but the last twenty-five years or so has seen a marked extension to the global sphere, with a huge expansion in the array of topics covered. While some, such as matters of just conduct in war, have long been of concern, others are more recent and arise especially in the context of contemporary phenomena like intensified globalization, economic integration, and potentially catastrophic pandemics and anthropogenic climate change.

John Rawls’s seminal book The Law of Peoples initiated many debates about global justice (Rawls 1999). Several questions soon became prominent in discussions including: What principles should guide international action? What responsibilities do we have to the global poor? Should global inequality be morally troubling? Are there types of non-liberal people who should be tolerated? What kind of foreign policy is consistent with liberal values? Is a “realistic utopia” possible in the global domain? How might we transition effectively towards a less unjust world?

Contemporary events also played an enormous role in prompting philosophical inquiries. Prominent cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, forms of terrorism uncommon prior to 2001, intensified interest in immigration to affluent countries, increased dependence on the labor of those from low-income countries, and enormous threats to well-being, security and the environment became common catalysts for further work. Philosophers began to reflect on questions such as: Is it ever permissible to engage in coercive military action for humanitarian purposes, such as to halt genocide or prevent large-scale violations of human rights? Can terrorism ever be justified? Should affluent countries open their borders more generously than they currently do to those from low-income countries who would like to immigrate to them? Are our current global economic arrangements fair ones and if not, how should they be transformed? What responsibilities do we have to one another in a globalized, post-Westphalian world order? How should we allocate responsibilities for reducing global injustice in our world, such as in the case of distributing costs associated with addressing climate change?

Increased interest concerning issues of global justice also coincided with enhanced interest in the place and value of nationalism. These explorations tracked events such as nationalist clashes which spilled over into widespread suffering (notably in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda), increased calls for national self-determination to carry considerable weight, such as in state recognition for Palestinians or Tibetans, and also in the case of secession (prominently, Quebec). In this area global justice theorists have been concerned with a range of important questions such as: Under what conditions should claims to national self-determination be granted substantial weight? When should self-determination yield to concern for protecting human rights? Are commitments to nationalism and global justice compatible? Is genuine democracy only possible at the state level or are there robust forms of democracy that are possible in more international fora? How are ideals of democracy best incorporated into defensible global institutional arrangements? Is world justice possible without a world state? In recent years reflection on existential threats like climate change, war, and pandemics and how perspectives of the oppressed might inform the future of the sub-discipline, have contributed new dimensions to answering core questions along with adding central questions within the field.

The primary purpose of this article is to give an orientation to the enormous and rapidly expanding field of global justice. There are several entries in this encyclopedia that already cover some of the core topics well and these will be cross-referenced. But there are still many important gaps, along with some missing context as to how some topics fit together. This entry aims primarily to address these needs.

1.1 Global and International Justice

1.2 what is a theory of global justice, 1.3 when is a problem a global justice problem, 2.1 the influence of rawls’s law of peoples, 2.2 what global duties do we have, 2.3 cosmopolitanism, duties to non-compatriots, and compatriots, 2.4 human rights fulfillment, 3.1 war and just conduct, 3.2 humanitarian intervention, 3.3 terrorism, 4. global economic injustice, 5. global gender justice, 6. race and global justice, 7. immigration, 8. global environmental issues, 9. global health issues, 10.1 natural resources and global justice, 10.2 allocating responsibilities for global problems, 10.3 authority in the global domain: do we need a world state to secure global justice, 11. the contribution to public policy, interdisciplinary engagement, and new methods, other internet resources, related entries, 1. some definitional issues.

A distinction is often drawn between global and international justice. The key point of difference between these two notions involves clarifying the entities among which justice is sought. In international justice the nation or state is taken as the central entity of concern and justice among nations or states is the focus. In the domain of global justice, by contrast, theorists do not seek primarily to define justice between states or nations. Rather they drill down through the state shell and inquire about what justice requires among human beings. Global justice inquiries take individual human beings as of primary concern and seek to give an account of what fairness among such agents involves. There are several types of actions that cut across states or involve different agents, relationships, and structures that might be invisible in an inquiry seeking justice among states exclusively. Many different kinds of interactions are not circumscribed by state membership and yet can importantly affect human beings’ most fundamental interests, so asking the question about what individual human beings owe one another often uncovers significant neglected features of relationships and structures that are of normative concern. Global justice analyses are not precluded from yielding state-level obligations; indeed, they typically do. However, they consider a wider array of possible agents and organizations that might have duties as well.

There are advantages associated with both types of inquiries. An important advantage of asking what states owe one another is that much international law presupposes the states system and requires states to perform various actions to promote justice. In this way, responsibilities often appear to be clearly allocated to particular parties thus making it quite precise who ought to do what in our actual world. One advantage of global justice inquiries is that we are not forced to take states as a fixed constraint and we can therefore consider a range of relevant relationships, capacities and roles that also structure our interactions and might be relevant to how we ought to conceptualize global responsibilities. While asking about what individuals owe each other may well have implications for states and their obligations, a range of other agents and institutions may also have relevant justice obligations. These responsibilities can become more visible when we explore what individuals owe each other. The two approaches have different strengths and can complement each other, but in contemporary debate they are often taken as rivals competing to provide the most plausible framework.

For further discussion of international justice, see the entry on international distributive justice .

In general, a theory of global justice aims to give us an account of what justice on a global scale consists in and this often includes discussion of the following components:

• identifying what should count as important problems of global justice
• positing solutions to each identified problem
• identifying who might have responsibilities in addressing the target problem
• arguing for positions about what particular agents (or collections of agents) ought to do in connection with solving each problem and
• providing a normative view which grounds (1)–(4).

Theories of global justice aim to help us understand our world better and what our responsibilities are in it. While some theorists aim purely at theoretical understanding, others hope also to provide an analysis that can be useful in practical policy making concerning global justice matters.

Problems of global justice arise when one (or more) of the following conditions obtain:

• Actions stemming from an agent, institution, practice, activity (and so on) that can be traced to one (or more) states negatively affect residents in another state.
• Institutions, practices, policies, activities (and so on) in one (or more) states could bring about a benefit or reduce harm to those resident in another state.
• There are normative considerations that require agents in one state to take certain actions with respect to agents or entities in another. Such actions might be mediated through institutions, policies, or norms.
• We cannot solve a problem that affects residents of one or more states without co-operation from other states.

So, in general, a problem is one of global justice when the problem either affects agents resident in more than one state or the problem is unresolvable without their co-operation. For the problem to be considered genuinely global rather than regional it should affect more than one regional area.

2. Principles to Guide Behavior in International and Global Matters

What sorts of duties of justice, if any, exist among human beings who do not reside in the same country? If there are such duties, what grounds them? Some argue that John Rawls’s principles developed for the case of domestic justice, notably, the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle or the Difference Principle, should apply globally (Beitz 1999; Caney 2005a; Moellendorf 2002). Others maintain that the content of our duties to one another is best explored by examining alternative concepts not featured in the Rawlsian corpus, such as capabilities or human rights (Nussbaum 2006; Pogge 2008; Nussbaum 2015).

Much discussion about what we owe one another in the global context is influenced by the work of John Rawls, so a short synopsis is needed to situate debates. Since discussion of these issues is amply covered in the entries on international distributive justice and John Rawls , this will be a compressed summary focusing only on the most central aspects of the debate that have a bearing on core topics of global justice.

In The Law of Peoples , John Rawls argues for eight principles that he believes should regulate international interactions of peoples. For Rawls, a “people” is constituted by a group of persons who have in common sufficient characteristics such as culture, history, tradition, or sentiment. Rawls uses the term “people” in ways that relevantly correspond with how many use the term “nation”. In addition, Rawls often assumes that, for the most part, each people has a state.

The eight principles Rawls endorses acknowledge peoples’ independence and equality, that peoples have the right to self-determination along with having duties of non-intervention, that they ought to observe treaties, honor a particular list of human rights, should conduct themselves in certain appropriate ways if they engage in warfare, and that they have duties to assist other peoples in establishing institutions to enable people’s self-determination. He also advocates for international institutions governing trade, borrowing, and other international matters that are characteristically dealt with by the United Nations.

Several claims have been the subject of much debate between critics and defenders of Rawls’s position. In particular, Rawls believes that so long as all peoples have a set of institutions that enable citizens to lead decent lives, any global inequality that might remain is not morally troubling. Critics draw attention to the ways in which global inequality – perhaps in levels of power or affluence – can convert into opportunities for deprivation and disadvantage. For instance, the global advantaged can use their superior position to influence the rules that govern international institutions – such as trade practices – which can facilitate further opportunities for increased advantage and so they can indeed threaten the abilities of others in distant lands to lead decent lives (Pogge 2008). [ 1 ]

Another important issue that underlies debate between Rawls and his critics concerns different views about the nature and origins of prosperity. Rawls gives a particularly strong statement of what he takes the causes of prosperity to be. He claims that the causes of the wealth of a people can be traced to the domestic political culture, the virtues and vices of leaders, and the quality of domestic institutions. He says:

I believe that the causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political culture and in the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that support the basic structure of their political and social institutions, as well as in the industriousness and cooperative talents of its members … The crucial elements that make the difference are the political culture, the political virtues and civic society of the country (Rawls 1999, 108).

Critics observe that in addition to local factors, there are also international ones which play an important role in prospects for well-being. Thomas Pogge prominently helps bring some of these into view. The international borrowing and resource privileges, are good examples of the ways in which international practices can have profound effects on domestic factors which undeniably also play a role in promoting prosperity. According to the international borrowing privilege, governments may borrow amounts of money on behalf of the country and the country thereby incurs an obligation to repay the debt. The international resource privilege refers to a government’s ability to do what it likes with resources, including selling them to whomever it chooses to and at what price. Any group that exercises effective power in a state is internationally recognized as the legitimate government of that territory and enjoys the two privileges. But, Pogge argues, this sets up undesirable incentives that hamper developing countries’ abilities to flourish (Pogge 2008). These include incentivizing those strongly motivated to hold office for material gain to take power by force or exercise it in ways that help reinforce oppressive governments’ abilities to retain control. The global advantaged benefit greatly from these privileges and so have little incentive to reform them. But, according to Pogge, reforms are sorely needed. If only sufficiently legitimate governments are able to enjoy these privileges, the international community would remove one important obstacle developing countries currently face.

Defenders of Rawls’s views argue that his position is more complex than is commonly acknowledged and allows for both a principled stance on some fundamental values along with appropriate openness to alternative ways in which legitimate and decent peoples might organize their collective lives (Reidy 2004; Freeman 2006). They argue that Rawls’s position shows great sensitivity to a number of factors that must be weighed in considering right conduct in international affairs. For instance, when Rawls makes his bold claims about the causes of wealth it is useful to bear in mind the context in which he is arguing. Against an assumption that resources are enormously important for a society’s ability to flourish, Rawls emphasizes the importance of strong institutions, political culture and other local factors, in sustaining decent lives for citizens. Rawls also reflects on the difficulty of changing political culture, noting that simply transferring resources will not help. Interestingly, in a little discussed passage, Rawls ventures that an “emphasis on human rights may work to change ineffective regimes and the conduct of rulers who have been callous about the well-being of their own people” (Rawls 1999, 109). For more on whether Rawls provides us with a cogent model that can provide sage guidance in international matters see the entries on on international distributive justice and John Rawls . See also Martin and Reidy (2006). For the purposes of this entry we need only summarize some key questions that were influential in setting the terms of discussion about global justice for some time.

Some key questions are:

• What principles should govern interactions among peoples at the global level?
• What are the causes of prosperity and are they traceable entirely to domestic factors or are international considerations relevant?
• What should count as the kind of prosperity or well-being that we are aiming to promote?
• Do we have an obligation to ensure people have their basic needs met and can otherwise lead “decent” lives, or should we be more concerned with global socio-economic equality?
• What duties do we have to those peoples who do not yet have what they need for self-determination or prosperity?
• If human rights serve an important role in world affairs, which rights should be on our list of those to endorse? What duties arise from such commitment?
• Can we properly hold nations to be entirely responsible for the well-being of their people and if so, in what kinds of conditions might this make sense? How do we encourage nations to take responsibility for their people’s well-being?
• When we consider what we owe one another, do compatriots deserve special consideration?

We trace some of the influential positions that have shaped answers to these questions next.

One of the most visible and large-scale contemporary global justice problems we face is that of global poverty. What ought we to do for the 1 billion or so people who currently live in poverty? This is a huge area nicely canvassed in the entry on international distributive justice . A few seminal arguments deserve mention here as well, however. In a classic argument Peter Singer describes a so-called easy rescue case in which an infant is drowning in a shallow pond. You happen by and can save the child with minimal effort and inconvenience on your part. Singer argues that you would be obligated to assist using the principle that when it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything significant or comparable, it is wrong not to prevent the bad from occurring. So, Singer argues that we have extensive duties to assist needy others, whether they be geographically proximate or not. We have extensive duties to assist the global poor who, with equally minimal effort on our part, can be saved from dire circumstances, since the same principle applies in both cases (Singer 1972). (For more treatment see Unger 1996 and for criticism see Lichtenberg 2013).

Thomas Pogge offers another influential contribution in World Poverty and Human Rights . He argues that since developed countries impose a coercive global order on the poor that foreseeably and avoidably causes great harm, they have important responsibilities to reform the global order such that it ceases to do so and instead better secures human rights (Pogge 2002, 2008, 2010). We harm the global poor when we collaborate in imposing an unjust global institutional order on them and, moreover, that order is unjust when it foreseeably perpetuates large-scale human rights deficits that can reasonably be avoided were we to make quite feasible institutional modifications (Pogge 2002, 2008, 2010). We also harm the poor when we deprive them of their resources and through a shared and violent history (Pogge 2008). While Singer emphasizes our capacity to assist with need satisfaction, Pogge emphasizes instead our contributions to the problem as grounding our duties.

When discussing our duties to one another there is also vigorous debate about what the content and target of our duties should be, along with discussion about what are the best ways to discharge these. Traditional dominant economic approaches to promoting prosperity have focused on raising income levels or increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Railing against such approaches, Amartya Sen suggested that the capabilities approach provides an improved measure of well-being and constitutes a better way to capture changes in people’s condition over time (Sen 1980). Exploring what people are able to do and be provides a more appropriate standard by which to evaluate whether their condition has improved rather than focusing exclusively on their incomes or per capita GDP. Martha Nussbaum develops this approach and argues for a list of ten capabilities that should be secured for all people in all places. This universal list can provide an important tool in persuading governments to make reforms conducive to their citizens’ flourishing. (See the entry on the capability approach for more.) Another important discourse for discussing duties is that of human rights which is discussed in Section 2.4 below. Before we continue it is important to mention that there are many possible ways to understand the content of our duties to one another. (For more see entries on egalitarianism , equality , sufficiency , capability theory , well-being , and needs in moral and political philosophy ). The issue of our duties to one another is a vast topic and we continue to discuss it throughout this entry. This section serves only as an introduction.

When considering what we owe one another, are compatriots special? Do we have the same duties to non-compatriots as we have to compatriots or is there some principled way in which these two sets of duties ought to differ?

Nationalists argue that we belong to national communities and any account of our global responsibilities that ignores this omits an important aspect of how we relate – and ought to relate – to one another. They argue that nations can provide a valuable grounding for social attachment, identity and meaning in life, and can ground special obligations to strengthen national life and assist co-nationals (Miller 1995; Tamir 1993; Lenard 2012). Others defend the value of nationalism on instrumental grounds; there is nothing inherently special about our co-national relationships but state boundaries are useful in assigning important duties to particular agents (Goodin 1998). In a world of great unmet need, paying special attention to one’s co-nationals can be justified (Goodin 1998; Lenard 2012). [ 2 ]

In the words of Diogenes, widely credited as the first person to propound cosmopolitan views, cosmopolitans see themselves as “citizens of the world”. Contemporary cosmopolitans typically hold that every human being has standing as an ultimate unit of moral concern and is entitled to equal consideration of her interests no matter what other affiliations, especially national affiliations, she might have. Drawing on the idea that we all have equal moral worth, cosmopolitans seek to broaden our moral horizons so that we do not forget about the responsibilities we have to others beyond state borders, even when we have local responsibilities as well.

Prominent cosmopolitans frequently offer accounts that feature different elements. Martha Nussbaum emphasizes that, as human beings, we belong to a global community of human persons (Nussbaum 1996). Nussbaum argues that while love for one’s country might have a legitimate place in people’s conceptions of a good life, we should not overlook the many other relationships we are in which connect us to others in the world. We need to draw the global community in closer to the local one, and, more generally, aim to see ourselves as members of overlapping communities which also have important claims on us.

By contrast, Thomas Pogge focuses on the implications of cosmopolitanism for the global institutional order. We need to ensure that global institutional structures give equal consideration to everyone’s interests. He says, “Insofar as human agents are involved in the design or administration of global rules, practices, or organizations, they ought to disregard their private and local, including national, commitments and loyalties to give equal consideration to the needs and interests of every human being on this planet” (Pogge 2013, 298). This equal-consideration-of-interests requirement only applies to such contexts. While such impartiality norms are perfectly familiar within the state, for instance, when judges operate in law courts, we have yet to realize the requirement at the global level.

It is often assumed that cosmopolitanism must necessarily be in tension with more local attachments to friends, family or compatriots. Some cosmopolitans believe such conflict is inevitable, unproblematic and a necessary part of understanding what cosmopolitanism entails (Ypi 2013a). Others argue for different ways in which the apparent tensions could be resolved (Pogge 2013; Tan 2004; Appiah 2007; Cabrera 2020). As we see above, Pogge emphasizes the clear separation of spheres in which equal consideration of people’s interests applies. Kok-Chor Tan offers a similar argument. His strategy is to show that cosmopolitan principles should govern global institutional structures that ensure people are treated as equals in their entitlements (Tan 2004). When this is the case there can be a legitimate role for patriotism that operates within such constraints. Partiality to co-nationals need not conflict with cosmopolitan obligations. Another notable strategy is to argue that we cannot achieve justice at a national level unless we attend to justice at a global level. On this view, we have at least instrumental reasons to care about global justice, even if we care deeply about social justice in our nation (Banai; Ronzoni and Schemmel 2011; Ronzoni 2013).

There is an important debate among egalitarian theorists about whether our concern with equality should be confined to members of the same state or whether it should extend to all globally. Some theorists argue that careful consideration of notions such as reciprocity, coercion, or fair terms of co-operation mandate that we give special weighting to the interests of compatriots (Blake 2013). Others, by contrast, argue that these concerns, when properly understood, point in the direction of equally strong duties to non-compatriots. One form of the argument that we have special duties to compatriots that are not shared with non-compatriots, draws on the coercive legal structure that applies within states and claims that such coercive structures do not apply outside of them (R. Miller 1998; Blake 2001). Another highly influential version claims that there is a difference in the authority to enforce justice within and outside the state (Nagel 2005). There are many important challenges to such positions. One important line of argument maintains that coercion is indeed relevant in triggering duties of egalitarian justice, but since this is rampant at the global level it activates global not just national egalitarian duties (Cohen and Sabel 2006; Abizadeh 2007; Valentini 2012). So, the same ingredients Nagel identifies as crucial in generating state authority exist at the global level as well (Cohen and Sabel 2006). Nicole Hassoun argues that there are many coercive international institutions and that, to be legitimate, these institutions must ensure that everyone they subject to coercive rules can secure what they need to consent or object to these rules. This requires adequate food, water, shelter, education, healthcare and the social and emotional support they require for sufficient autonomy (Hassoun 2012). Laura Valentini suggests coercion requires freedom as independence (non-domination) but this does not require egalitarianism in the global sphere. Rather, a just global order would be inclusive, not oppressive (Tan 2013, 25). Others provide novel ways of defending cosmopolitan egalitarian theories or combining them with statist commitments. Pablo Gilabert articulates a contractualist theory of egalitarian justice that generates positive obligations to eradicate severe poverty globally even without robust international institutions or cosmopolitan solidarity (2012). Similarly, Lea Ypi defends a statist cosmopolitanism that stresses the importance of political obligations to support cosmopolitan ends. She suggests a significant degree of equality is important for helping everyone secure a basic minimum and cultural resources, a sense of justice, and education can help promote this equality (Ypi 2012; on education and global justice, in particular, see Culp 2020a). Ypi sees fostering the commitment to cosmopolitan ideals as a political, as well as moral, task (Ypi 2013a).

Once again, these are vast topics and more treatment can be found elsewhere in this encyclopedia, such as the entry on international distributive justice . For comprehensive treatment of nationalism and cosmopolitanism see the entries on nationalism and cosmopolitanism , respectively.

Discussion of global justice matters often invokes concern for human rights. In fact, for all their differences, both nationalists and cosmopolitans frequently agree that a good way to think about some of our duties to one another is via human rights. Human rights can and do therefore serve as an important discourse for furthering discussion about our global responsibilities.

Respecting human rights is an important requirement in much international law and can be a key criterion in evaluating whether governments are considered legitimate by the international community. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a highly influential account of all human beings’ basic entitlements and this document often plays an important role in real world debates about justice matters. See the comprehensive entry on human rights for more detail. Here we have space to discuss only two issues that have been prominent in debates about global justice.

The first concerns the kinds of duties we have in relation to human rights. Against a conventional view widespread before 1980, Henry Shue argues that if rights to physical security are basic, so are rights to subsistence (Shue 1980). A careful analysis of the duties associated with human rights indicates that the commonly held distinction between positive and negative duties cannot be maintained. All rights have a range of both positive and negative duties associated with them.

The second prominent issue concerns whether our failures in relation to fulfilling human rights amount to rights violations. Thomas Pogge (2008) offers an influential account of duties with respect to human rights. Our current global order perpetuates global poverty on a massive scale, but since feasible reforms to that order could avert this harm, our failure to make reforms not only implicates us in the misery but also in the violation of the rights of the poor. [ 3 ] We therefore have extensive obligations to reform our global order so that the rights of the poor can be fulfilled.

Many theorists have done important work on a range of issues concerning human rights and international obligations (Buchanan 2004; Hessler 2005; Nickel 2007; Beitz 2009; Holder and Reidy 2013; Song 2019). Theorists have also focused attention on particular rights, prominently the right to health (Wolff 2013). Some important questions include: What are human rights’ grounds or can they be defined by their functions? Are human rights properly moral or political/legal? Does respect for rights conflict with community obligations or respect for culture? What is the proper role of human rights in morality, law, and policy? How should we best understand the normative implications of our contemporary human rights practice? (Wolff 2013; Cruft, Liao, and Renzo 2015; Gilabert 2019; Etinson 2018; O’Neill 2005; Beitz 2009; Brock 2023).

For more treatment of issues, especially concerning what human rights are, which rights are rightly construed as human rights, and how human rights function in international law, see the entry on human rights .

3. The Proper Use of Force, Military Intervention, and its Aftermath

Within the field of global justice, issues concerning war have one of the longest histories. The just war framework has been influential in setting the terms of much debate about the proper use of force in international affairs. Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas offered some of the earliest accounts of the criteria that should be met for war to be justified. Two areas have been especially thoroughly studied: (1) the conditions under which entry into the war is justified (Jus Ad Bellum) and (2) the conditions for fair conduct within the war (Jus In Bello). While having a just cause is standardly held to be a necessary condition for a war to be justified, it is not sufficient. Theorists often disagree about which additional conditions must be satisfied for a war to be characterized as a just war. The most common additional conditions proposed are that the war should be undertaken by a proper authority, with the right intentions, when the war would follow requirements of proportionality (the ends to be secured would warrant going to war), only as a last resort, and when there are reasonable prospects of success. On traditional accounts of just war theory all conditions must be met, while several theorists challenge whether they are all necessary (Mellow 2006; Moellendorf 2002; Walzer 1983).

Once the fighting begins two central principles guide evaluation of whether the war is being conducted fairly: one which respects the distinction between combatants and noncombatants (The Principle of Non-Combatant Immunity) and another that governs what counts as the proportional use of force (Proportionality). On the first, it is not legitimate to use force against civilians and, even though some collateral civilian damage may occur, it is wrong to deliberately target non-combatants. On the second, combatants may only use the force necessary to achieve their ends – the force used must be proportional to the ends that are to be secured in conducting the war. There are further requirements governing fairness, such as requirements to comply with international laws and treat prisoners fairly, but the two featured principles are the most commonly invoked in normative analyses of Jus In Bello .

The third part of just war theory ( Jus Post Bellum ) concerns how the war concludes and the transition back to a situation of peace (Bass 2004, Rodin 2008). It deals with issues such as compensation, punishment, and reform (Ohlin 2014). A fourth component has been suggested especially in light of engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan in the years 2001–2011, namely, justice in exiting the war ( Jus Ex Bello ), which concerns when it is appropriate to end a war (Moellendorf 2008; Rodin 2008).

There are many contemporary global justice issues concerning the appropriate use of force (and its aftermath) that currently command attention including: Is drone warfare (or any kind of warfare) permissible? Can terrorism ever be justified? Are “targeted assassinations” (where leaders who are primarily responsible for decisions to go to war are targeted for assassination) justifiable? May we engage in a war in order to prevent an anticipated “worse war”? Is torture to contain major global threats permissible? Is the attempt to contain nuclear weapons development by those who have them already fraught with hypocrisy? How should we deal best with societies in a state of transitional justice? Is there a place for “Truth and Reconciliation Committees” (Walker 2006)? When are political apologies for historic injustice in warfare appropriate? Some suggest that the changing nature of combat has fundamentally altered the ethics of war, for instance emphasizing how individuals can be held morally accountable for their participation and actions contributing to unjust wars (Ryan 1983; McMahan 2009; Pfaffe 2020; Ohlin 2014; Reitan 2018). Scholars also consider different ways to engage in defensible non-militaristic international reform interventions (Rafanelli 2021).

Here we consider very briefly only two further issues that continue to attract widespread current interest in the global justice literature: Humanitarian Intervention and Terrorism. See the entry on terrorism for an extended analysis of such questions. See the entry on war for a comprehensive overview of issues concerning justice in war.

Under what conditions, if any, may we engage in military intervention aimed at stopping genocide? In recent years this issue has become salient as large-scale human rights violations and suffering unfolded in Rwanda, the Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, and Libya. Against the traditional understanding that respecting state sovereignty requires non-interference, successful arguments were marshaled that there are important responsibilities to protect the vulnerable (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001). Leaning heavily on the conventional conditions contained in the just war framework, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty argued that we may engage in war aimed at protecting those who suffer at the hands of governments unwilling or unable to stop large-scale human rights abuses. The commission produced an influential report “The Responsibility to Protect” which was accepted by the United Nations in 2005, and the principles contained in the report have guided decisions about cases, such as Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012. One frequently voiced concern about humanitarian interventions is whether they are just another form of imperialism. How will interveners be held accountable for their actions? Taking such concerns seriously Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane advocate for a series of innovative mechanisms of accountability, both before and after the proposed intervention takes place, to allay fears about abuse (Buchanan and Keohane 2004).

What kinds of violence count as terrorism? Is there a difference between state terrorism and that perpetrated by insurgent organizations? Might terrorism be justified under certain circumstances? Terrorism centrally involves either using or threatening to use violence against people, commonly taken to be innocent, in order to produce results that would not otherwise occur (Coady and O’Keefe 2002; Primoratz 2013). Some challenge that the targets are innocent. As terrorists often point out about citizen complicity in atrocities, citizens pay taxes and vote, and their governments undertake actions that they can be said to sanction and from which they benefit, so it is coherent to hold citizens responsible for their governments’ actions. On this argument, citizens can be legitimate targets of violence. In addition, there is relevant precedent from governments targeting civilians when they perceive the situation to be one of a “supreme emergency”, as happened in the case of Britain targeting German civilians in the Second World War. So when governments judge that some moral disaster is sufficiently likely, it can be repelled using unorthodox and otherwise repugnant means.

Do global economic arrangements – especially economic globalization – give rise to important responsibilities? Globalization is a complex phenomenon, characterized by the faster movement of people, goods, and ideas across borders but with many facets. For our purposes we need to note only some of its characteristic central features. These include (i) an increasingly globally integrated economy, (ii) dominated by transnational corporations engaged in activities (such as production and distribution) that span multiple countries, (iii) increasing regulation of economic matters by supranational institutions (such as the World Trade Organization), (iv) general commitment to removal of barriers to “free trade,” and (v) higher levels of economic interdependence. While there is much debate about the long-term effects of globalization and whether they are on balance good or bad, at this stage, the effects of globalization have been mixed. For some, globalization has brought improvements, while it has worsened the position of others (Singer 2002; Hassoun 2008; Risse 2012a; Risse and Wollner 2019).

Philosophers have been concerned with answers to a range of questions such as: What kinds of economic arrangements are just? Should our international institutions be reformed to better reflect fair terms of co-operation in our globalized world? Can globalization be better managed so that it works to assist the global poor more effectively? Are protectionist policies in trade justified or, rather, is free trade required by considerations of justice? Should poor working conditions in developing countries be a matter of concern for citizens and consumers in affluent, developed countries? If so, how might harmful employment conditions be effectively improved?

While Thomas Pogge argues that globalization has harmed the poor on a massive scale, Mathias Risse argues that this is not at all clear (Pogge 2010; Risse 2005). Risse argues that in many ways the global order must be credited with benefiting the global poor as well. He challenges Pogge’s claim that there are feasible alternatives to our global order that could be easily implemented and would avert the harm to which Pogge draws attention.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an important focal point for discussion about global economic justice. In particular, critics argue that some of its policies, such as those that generally advocate free trade but allow protectionism in affluent developed countries, involve grave hypocrisy and unfairness to some of the world’s most vulnerable people, while others defend some key WTO provisions (Risse and Wollner 2019; Pogge 2001; Moellendorf 2002; Hassoun 2009a, 2011; James 2012). For further reading see: de Bres 2016. There are also large disparities in the resources at the disposal of various parties such that weaker parties often suffer huge disadvantages in being able to negotiate agreements that work well for them. In these sorts of ways agents in developed countries (such as governments, citizens or firms) can take unfair advantage of those in developing countries (R. Miller 2010; Barry and Reddy 2008).

More generally, there are concerns related to the extraordinary power of multinationals and the undue influence they are able to exercise in negotiating deals favorable to them at the expense of the interests of the most vulnerable. So-called sweatshops (in which workers typically labor under harsh and hazardous conditions) are also a frequently raised example of how western consumers are implicated in far away suffering, given the high level of dependence in high-income countries on labor from low-income ones. When we purchase products manufactured in sweatshops are we guilty of contributing to exploitation and if so, what ought we to do to mitigate these unfairnesses? Christian Barry and Sanjay Reddy offer an innovative proposal to incentivize improvements in labor standards and wage levels in poor developing countries (Barry and Reddy 2008). This “Just Linkage” proposal offers some additional desirable opportunities for enhanced international trade to those who meet higher standards.

In this domain, philosophers have also examined a range of other issues including obligations to forgive odious debt and whether micro-finance is to be welcomed as a positive force for the global poor (Barry, Herman and Tomitova 2007; Khader 2014; Sorell and Cabrera 2015; Hassoun 2019).

Several philosophers have considered individuals’ obligations to promote economic justice through ethical consumption. There is an important debate on whether ethical consumption is helpful and required (Risse 2005; Walton 2014). Some argue that ethical consumption is only permissible when appropriately democratic (Hussain 2012; Barry and MacDonald 2018). Others argue that ethical consumption is permissible as long as it promotes positive change (Hassoun 2018; Berkey 2021; Budolfson 2015).

Other more general concerns about exploitation and economic justice can be found at the entries on exploitation and normative economics and economic justice . See also the entry on globalization .

The effects of poverty do not fall equally on men and women, nor on boys and girls. In general, poverty makes the lives of women and girls harder than their male counterparts, as cultural expectations often dictate that women and girls do more care and domestic work or go without (or much less) when resources are scarce. This can significantly thwart women and girls’ well-being, as education, health care, and food are routinely withheld in favor of distribution to men and boys.

Cultural perceptions of gender roles can often lead to practices highly damaging to the most fundamental interests of women and girls. These include “honor killings” (where it is believed culturally permissible to kill a girl or woman who is perceived to have brought shame to the family), genital mutilation, infanticide, forced prostitution, arranged marriage, and legal recognition of property and inheritance rights that significantly disadvantage women and girls. Poverty can exacerbate such vulnerabilities so we have further reasons to address it as a matter of urgency (Jaggar 2009, 2013, 2014). Martha Nussbaum has argued for a list of ten capabilities that all human persons, no matter what their gender, ought to be positioned to exercise. She argues that this approach offers a powerful tool for persuasion in cases where girls and women are denied these opportunities by local actors in different cultures.

Alison Jaggar prominently argues that various structures create and recreate transnational gendered vulnerabilities and she illustrates with practices common in domestic work and the sex industry (Jaggar 2009, 2014). Anca Gheaus has argued that patterns of international immigration – where women typically provide an international market for care work – constitute a kind of care drain. This work is not fully voluntary occurring against a background of unjust options, and amounts to a major issue for women and their families as well as countries and global justice more broadly (Gheaus 2013; Eckenwiler 2009). Others focus on how universal values can inform feminist approaches and discuss how concrete issues like globalization affect women (Khader 2014, 2018; Parekh and Wilcox 2018). (For more see also the entry on feminist perspectives on globalization ).

Some important policies have influenced international discourse in combating gender injustice. The Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) includes as a third goal the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women (for discussion of the MGDs, see: Pogge and Sengupta 2020). The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action set the stage for several International Covenants and before that the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women afforded some important protection for women’s human rights. Some theorists are suspicious of human rights language and are inclined to reject what they perceive as a masculine or neocolonial discourse that trumpets individual autonomy in a way that fails to acknowledge, adequately, our fundamental human interdependence and history of oppression (Jaggar 2020). While there certainly is a place for discussion of these important themes, others argue that we should not lose sight of the important victories human rights have also been able to secure, despite still having a long way to go (United Nations n.d.). The rhetoric of human rights has enabled substantial gains for promoting gender equality and protection of women’s fundamental interests, so it has at least strategic value.

For a good survey of recent work on global gender justice, see Jaggar 2020. For more on solutions to often discussed problems, such as adaptive preferences, see Khader 2011, 2018. For more see the entries on feminist perspectives on globalization and feminist perspectives on power .

Discussion of how histories of imperialism and racial discrimination have shaped current patterns of global injustice have become more prominent in Anglo-American discussions of global justice. In particular, concerns arise about how colonial histories affect continued oppression and exploitation of racial minority groups on a global scale (Mills 1997; Bell 2019; Boxill 2009; Okeja 2019; Buckinx, Trejo-Mathys, and Waligore 2015a; Lu 2017). Shining a light on how colonialists often embraced beliefs about racial inferiority and superiority, theorists argue that white supremacy has played an important role in structuring ways of thinking about global justice. Key questions that emerge from such analysis include: Have debates about global justice been inclined to ignore imperial histories (especially of racial domination) and if so, how should that be taken into account now? Are egalitarian cosmopolitan accounts effectively trying to promote liberal imperialism or can such discourse effectively combat it? What alternative resources can we find in other traditions of political thought and practice for theorizing global justice in insightful ways? While some argue that liberalism and imperialism are inextricable (Mehta 1999), others are more optimistic about liberalism’s prospects. Yet others believe that sometimes imperial-like solutions are necessary to solve especially challenging problems (Ignatieff 2003). (For a good range of views see Bell 2019).

Reflecting on the philosophical field of global justice, it is notable that until more recently, race is often absent from some of the most prominent discussions of global justice. Charles Mills was an especially important figure in drawing attention to these omissions. In his view, this means that theoretical debates have largely ignored or misunderstood “some of the principal sources and sites of injustice” (2019). These omissions can often be traced to dominant methods in Anglo-American philosophy in which ideal theorizing (in a Rawlsian fashion in particular) brackets out certain issues in a conscious way. But putting to the side issues of (say) racial domination means we will be blind to core histories and practices, such as slavery, imperialism, and racism that structure our contemporary world.

Discussion of race and empire have not been completely ignored by global justice theorists. For instance, there is an important literature on historical injustice and reparations (Butt 2008; Tan 2007; Lu 2016; Barry and Goodin 2009), and another on trying to identify how to describe the wrongs of colonialism (Ypi 2013b; Stilz 2015; Valentini 2015). Margaret Moore draws attention to the ways in which the dispossession of land and racial domination are particularly important features in identifying the wrongs of settler colonialism (2016). And yet, the concerns Mills raises still resonate. What would global justice theorizing look like if it placed histories and contemporary practices of racial domination at its core? How can we better integrate histories of colonialism and racial domination into our thinking about current problems of global justice?

For some, this means we must reject theoretical frameworks and vocabularies currently on offer by most political philosophers; others do not believe wholesale rejection is needed. (For a good review of positions see Bell 2019). Charles Mills exemplifies the first approach. For Mills, global justice theorists have failed to take seriously global white supremacy and its legacy and this is especially noteworthy given its role in understanding current patterns of global inequality, poverty and violence (1997, 2019). We need to consider this history and make race a central site of investigation for global justice theorizing, which requires rejecting Rawlsian-style ideal theorizing. It would also involve giving a more prominent role to issues of corrective justice and seeking compensation for the wide-scale massive injustices perpetrated through structures of global white supremacy. Similar views can be found in the work of Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò who writes: “Injustice and oppression are global in scale… [b]ecause Trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism built the world we live in, and slavery and colonialism were unjust and oppressive”, reparations require remaking the “world system” (Táíwò 2022, 1). On his account, reparations require, among other things, reconciliation and eliminating institutional racism (Táíwò 2022, 4).

Another very important literature has emerged concerning the many alternative understandings of justice that can be found in places formerly dominated by colonial occupation. Indigenous philosophies have many important insights to offer (Lauer 2017; Metz 2017; Watene 2022). In particular, scholars often consider the prospects for indigenous perspectives to promote global environmental justice (Whyte 2014; Watene 2022). Locally embedded frameworks often support, but also provide new alternatives to, traditional approaches to human needs, rights, international development and justice issues more generally (Lauer 2017; Menkiti 2017; Metz 2017).

Ines Valdez (2019) argues we should substitute discourse centered on obligations and duties with one centered on power, coalition-building and contestation. Kimberley Hutchings (2019) emphasizes that in decolonizing our theorizing about global justice, we have to change the way we see the practice of global justice theorizing. We need to think of the latter less as a way to arrive at answers to global justice questions and more as a way to live with others without subsuming them into a particular world. Rather, opening up the conversation to sharing different perspectives we embark on a collaborative approach to experiments in living and being with others. It is not about finding new answers to what we mean by justice but rather “about finding new ways of relating to ourselves and to each other in our pursuit of whatever we may think of as justice” (2019, 121). Adopting such perspectives may reduce some noted tensions in being part of a world community and others that are smaller, drawn along racial, ethnic or other identity lines (Appiah 2007).

For more on these topics see the entries on colonialism , race , black reparations , reconciliation , transitional justice , and critical philosophy of race .

There are many issues debated in the global justice literature concerning migration, whether temporary, permanent, legally sanctioned or undocumented. These include: Should states have the right to control their borders? Even if they have such a right, should states be more generous in admitting would-be migrants, especially considering the facts about global disparities in life prospects? When affluent developed states refuse to open their borders to the economically disadvantaged, is this equivalent to members of the aristocracy unjustly protecting their privilege, as was the case in feudal times? What responsibilities are there to refugees? Can undocumented immigration be justified under certain contemporary circumstances? What sorts of criteria may affluent developed countries use when selecting migrants from the pool of applicants for citizenship? May they legitimately consider how prospective migrants would fit in with current citizens, favoring certain religious, linguistic, or ethnic affiliations to manage compatibility? When making migrant selection decisions, should they consider the effects on those who remain in countries of origin and if so, is this fair to the would-be migrants who would be excluded on grounds of alleged negative impacts for home country citizens? If states admit migrant workers, are there moral constraints on how they should be treated? Would admitting temporary workers without simultaneously allowing them a pathway to citizenship be unjust? What responsibilities do we have in relation to human trafficking?

There are several now classic defenses of state’s rights to control borders. David Miller (Miller 2005, 2007), Michael Walzer (Walzer 1981) and Christopher Wellman (Wellman and Cole 2011) have been particularly important. Prominent proponents of the alternative “Open Borders” position include Joseph Carens (Carens 1987, 2013), Philip Cole (Cole 2000; Wellman and Cole 2011), Chandran Kukathas (2021) and Alex Sager (2018). While many theorists discuss the responsibilities to refugees and guest workers, Walzer’s treatment is particularly influential, especially in arguing for his view that guest worker programs are only justified when they offer such “guests” a proper pathway to full and equal citizenship (Walzer 1981). See also: Owen 2020 and Miller 2020. Within the global justice literature, there is considerable discussion of the ethics of recruiting migrants away from poor countries. Whether brain drain issues should be salient for migration decisions has been a focal point for some discussion (Carens 2013; Oberman 2013; Brock and Blake 2015; Bertram 2018). More generally, much recent discussion concerns justice in state admission policies and the kinds of factors that may or should be included in deciding who to admit and exclude (Wellman and Cole 2011; Lister 2010; Oberman, Fine and Ypi 2016; Blake 2019; Sager 2018; Song 2018; Brock 2020; Morgan 2020; Wilcox 2021; Hidalgo 2021; Buckinx 2019; Jaggar 2020; Vasanthakumar 2022). There has been considerable discussion of appropriate treatment for refugees (see especially Serena Parekh 2017, 2020 and Brock 2020). And discussion has also focused on duties for those who leave their countries of origin (Vasanthakumar 2022; Brock and Blake 2015). For more detailed coverage of issues concerning migration matters, see the entry on immigration .

Patterns of human behavior that destroy habitats, accelerate species extinction, exacerbate toxic levels of pollution, degrade the oceans, contribute to ozone layer destruction, or increase population levels are all issues of global environmental concern (Armstrong 2022; Gardiner 2011; Gardiner, Caney, Jamieson, Shue, and Pachauri 2010). However, although there are many global environmental topics that are rightly concerns of global justice, there is one that dominates discussion and that concerns our responsibilities with respect to climate change. Here we focus exclusively on this issue.

Among the scientific community it is no longer controversial that anthropogenic climate change is real and a significant threat to the well-being of both current and future generations. But it is also widely acknowledged that human development is an important way to address high levels of global poverty, that such development is energy intensive, and the cheapest sources of energy available are not likely to be clean energy types. These considerations significantly affect efforts to deal with problems presented by climate change. There is much discussion about the principles that should inform a fair treaty aimed at dealing with addressing climate change that also gives appropriate weight to concerns for human development (Shue 2014; Athanasiou et al. 2022). Some of the main contenders include principles that recognize causal responsibility for high emission levels, principles that are sensitive to ability to pay, and ones according to which those who have benefited from emissions should now be expected to absorb more costs.

We have not all contributed equally to the problems created by emissions; industrialized nations have contributed historically at much higher levels than those that are still developing. And so we should endorse the guidelines that those who have polluted more should pay more to help redress current problems (The Polluter Pays Principle). However critics argue that this principle unfairly holds some responsible when they did not know they were causing harm, since it was not widely known that greenhouse gases could result in climate change prior to 1990. So on this view, responsibility for emissions prior to 1990 should not conform with the Polluter Pays Principle, even if it is used to allocate costs after 1990. Others reply that countries can still be liable for causing harm even if they lack moral responsibility for doing so (Shue 2014). A second principle that is often discussed is The Beneficiary Pays Principle. Those who live in industrialized countries have typically benefited greatly from high levels of emissions so it is not unfair if they are expected to pay a higher proportion of costs. Critics object that a history of benefiting is an insufficiently strong consideration for assigning responsibilities now: in many cases whether or not people benefit is largely outside of their control. According to a third popular principle, The Ability to Pay Principle, the capacity of agents to pay for costs associated with mitigating climate change should be relevant. Again, some object that the ability to pay is a poor principle for assigning responsibility.

More recently, philosophers have evaluated different proposals for not only mitigating and distributing the costs of climate change but also adaptation to its diverse effects (Gosseries 2004; Vanderheiden 2008; Gardiner, Caney, Jamieson, Shue, and Pachauri 2010; Blomfield 2019; Shue 2014, 2021; Brooks 2020). Moreover, they have considered how we can mobilize hope in the face of the seemingly tragic consequences of our failures to both address the challenges of climate change and human development in a timely manner (Moellendorf 2022; Cripps 2022; Malm 2021; Mckinnon 2022). Some of this work connects to important debates about feasibility and institutional mechanisms for addressing climate change fairly (Caney 2020; Gheaus 2013; Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012). For more on climate justice see the entries on climate justice and climate science (Parker 2018; Caney 2022). Comprehensive treatment of climate justice requires addressing the issue of responsibilities to future generations (Meyer and Gossieries 2009). For important treatment of our responsibilities to other generations see the entry on intergenerational justice .

One striking feature of the state of global health is that there are large inequalities in health outcomes and opportunities for health. Consider that life expectancy can vary a great deal. A person born in Sierra Leone can expect to live about 40 years whereas one born in Japan can expect to live for 80 years. Malaria has been almost entirely eradicated in high-income countries, but it still kills about a million people in developing countries per year (United Nations 2009). A woman in Niger has a 1 in 7 chance of dying in childbirth, whereas this is 1 in 11 000 for women in Canada (Benatar and Brock 2011, 2021). The global burden of disease is by no means evenly spread nor does workforce capability correspond with areas of highest need. In fact many of the countries that suffer from the greatest burdens of disease have the fewest skilled healthcare workers. In addition, pharmaceutical companies do not spend their research and development budgets in ways that match where the needs are greatest. Rather, seeking the most profitable ventures, they are much more likely to spend resources developing drugs for lucrative markets where the payoffs are greatest, even when the marginal benefits to consumers are small. One example is the research and development resources pharmaceutical companies frequently spend on developing drugs that are similar to others already available, rather than developing treatments for diseases for which there are no cures. Historically, it is estimated that drug companies spent approximately 90% of their research and development resources in seeking treatment for about 10% of diseases and some argue that justice requires reorienting incentives for new research and development to better align with the global disease burden (Drugs for Neglected Diseases Working Group 2001; Flory and Kitcher 2004).

The poor in developing countries are also often more vulnerable to disease and less able to resist disease because of poor living conditions related to poverty. Lack of clean water, clean energy sources, inadequate nutrition, and other social determinants of health play a key role in explaining this increased vulnerability. Living in overcrowded houses can facilitate the spread of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis. So, a number of issues that sustain poverty or exacerbate people’s vulnerability to disease as a result of poverty should be of concern (Benatar and Brock 2021). As Norman Daniels argues, health inequalities among different social groups can be considered unjust when they result from unjust distribution in factors that are socially controllable that affect population health (Daniels 2011, 101). On this view many health inequalities that exist are ones that ought to be of concern as they meet this criterion. How should responsibilities for improving this situation be allocated? In many ways, but here we pick out just a few that have received considerable attention in the philosophical literature.

The current system of intellectual property rights is one troubling area. The World Trade Organization grants product patents for a twenty year period which effectively renders many new medicines unaffordable for the vast majority of the world’s population and those in greatest need. There are a number of innovative proposals aimed at addressing these issues. One prominent example is the Health Impact Fund proposal developed by Thomas Pogge, which offers alternative ways to reward pharmaceutical companies, notably by how much impact they have on actually curing diseases (Pogge 2008). The greater their impact, the larger the share of the rewards they would receive from the Health Impact Fund. Nicole Hassoun proposes a “Global Health Impact” certification program for rating pharmaceutical companies’ contributions to the global poor (Hassoun 2020). Companies would compete for the gold star rankings which could significantly affect consumption choices and thereby expected profits. In both cases the aim is to create important incentives for key agents to care about how their products affect the global poor.

There are many other issues that concern philosophers in the domain of global health. There are worrying practices of experimentation on disadvantaged subjects in developing countries (Emanuel et al. 2004). Increasingly, clinical research has been outsourced to poor, developing countries with populations that are often highly vulnerable. We might wonder about whether these populations are being exploited and whether the participants have compromised abilities to consent to drug trials. In many cases the trials bring considerable health benefits that would not come their way were it not in the interests of pharmaceutical companies to do clinical research in those locations. If sufficient benefits accrue for local populations, some argue that these cases need not be of concern, while others disagree (Emanuel et al. 2004; London 2011).

New infectious diseases and the threat of pandemics are creating further questions about our responsibilities. Often the case is made that national interests in public health in developed countries mandate concern for infectious diseases that originate in developing countries. When resources for addressing these threats are limited, some argue it is acceptable for states to prioritize their populations, while others disagree (Hassoun 2021; Ferguson and Caplan 2021; Savulescu 2020). There are also important debates about how to distribute vaccines across borders and about whether other public health policies – e.g. immunity passports – violate individual rights or are justified for protecting public health (Emanuel et al. 2020; Emanuel et al. 2021; Herlitz et al. 2021; Liu, Salwi, and Drolet 2020; Persad and Emanuel 2020; Voigt 2022; Jecker 2022; Bramble 2020; Baylis and Kofler 2020a, 2020b; Jecker, Wightman, and Diekema, forthcoming). Some argue that global justice – solidarity and respect for human rights – demands addressing diseases that are not as transmissible as COVID-19 and may not pose as significant threats to many people in developed countries (Daniels 2007; Atuire and Hassoun 2023; Gould 2018; Lenard and Straehle 2012; Benatar and Brock 2021; Herlitz et al. 2021). There is also significant concern for fair procedures in addressing health crises globally.

For more see also public health ethics , and justice, inequality, and health .

10. Some Issues that Cut Across Several Themes

Discussion of natural resources often figures prominently in several topics of global justice. Some relevant questions include: Are national communities entitled to the resources they find on their territories? Should principles of global justice apply to our arrangements for justly distributing natural resources? Charles Beitz was an early proponent of a resource distribution principle, according to which natural resources should be allocated such that each society is able to provide adequately for its population (Beitz 1975). We saw in Section 2 that Rawls believes that resources are not important to prosperity in the ways many imagine. Rather, institutional resilience matters more. By contrast, Thomas Pogge highlights the ways in which international practices concerning the distribution of resources create considerable obstacles for prosperity in developing countries. In short, these practices create incentives for the wrong kinds of people to take power through illegitimate means and to focus on retaining power at the expense of other goals governments should have, such as trying to improve the well-being of their citizens. We need to modify these international practices so they do not create such an unfavorable environment. In addition, Pogge proposes a Global Resources Dividend as one measure by which practices concerning natural resource distribution would work in some small way to the benefit of the global poor. On this Global Resources Dividend proposal there would be a small tax on resource extraction, payable by the consumers of resources, and available for projects that would assist in helping everyone to be able to meet their basic needs with dignity (Pogge 2008).

Leif Wenar is also concerned with prevailing practices governing the sale of natural resources and their products (Wenar 2010, 2016). When consumers in wealthy states buy goods from developing countries, this is often similar to consciously receiving stolen goods. Legitimate resource sales require general agreement from citizens. Evidence of agreement requires that: (i) owners must be informed about sales, (ii) owners must be able to express dissent freely should they have doubts about sales, and (iii) owners should be able to stop resource sales without fearing grave consequences such as violence and intimidation. Wenar aims to outlaw dispossession of citizens’ resources by promoting various practices that would satisfy these conditions and promote clean trade (Wenar 2016).

For various reasons (including strategic ones) Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar do not directly challenge the right of nations to own resources on their territories. Policy recommendations, are much more likely to be effective if they can fit within the main structures of international conventions. However, other theorists do take up this issue including Hillel Steiner (2005), Tim Hayward (2005) and Mathias Risse (2005, 2012b). Steiner argues that all inhabitants of the world are entitled to an equal share in the value of all land and he advocates for the “Global Fund” which aims to ensure that equal share entitlements can be secured. The Global Fund would constitute a clearing house for payments and disbursements (Steiner 2005).

Appealing to accounts of ownership of resources, some philosophers draw out important implications for diverse global justice debates. Mathias Risse argues that we all, collectively, own the resources of the earth and this has profound implications for a range of global justice issues, including immigration. When people are under-utilizing their “rightful shares” of territory, they cannot complain when co-owners would like to occupy some of it. Some theorists concerned with environmental issues also discuss our rights with respect to natural resources. Some argue that we have equal rights to access the earth’s resources. Tim Hayward, for instance, argues that we have equal rights to ecological space (Hayward 2005). This is often appealed to when there is a perception that we have exceeded our share, such as in levels of carbon emissions and consumption more generally.

Accounts according to which we have equal rights to resources, land, ecological space and so on, are often accused of suffering from an important common problem. It is difficult to defend a clear and compelling account of the value of resources as these can vary considerably in different social, cultural and technological contexts. But we need to be able to quantify resource values to some plausible extent, if we are to determine whether people are enjoying or exceeding their equal shares (Armstrong 2017).

Others defend territorial sovereignty for other reasons. Some, like Cara Nine argue that collectives have a right to territory when they “establish legitimate, minimal conditions for justice within a geographical region” (Nine 2012, 2022). While Anna Stilz argues that states allow people to associate in specific geographical locations and realize economic, social, and cultural values free from interference as long as they respect others’ rights to associate as well (Stilz 2019). She defends collective self-determination that represents subjects’ political will and ensures self-directed agency and non-alienation where this is compatible with global justice. Stilz maintains that actual states only have a legitimate right to territory if they have rightful occupancy, implement a system of basic justice, and represent the shared will of most inhabitants. But, even when they do not, she thinks states can be justified in ruling a territory if they are the only available way of providing decent rule or changing their boundaries will jeopardize urgent interests or come with high costs (Stilz 2019).

Others argue against territorial sovereignty or for reconceiving sovereignty in a way that encourages respect for human rights and can limit our tendency towards war, coercion, inequality and collective action problems (Chatterjee 2011; Held 1995). Some maintain that all who are affected by states’ actions should have a say in their rules while others reject this conclusion. For discussion, see Buchanan and Keohane 2011. For other important work on territory, see the entry on territorial rights and territorial justice .

There are a number of global justice problems that need to be addressed, and this raises the issue of how to allocate responsibilities fairly. Who should do what to reduce global injustices? Several different agents, groups, organizations and institutions could play a role. Which responsibilities should devolve to corporations, governments, consumers, citizens, international organizations or social movements? Some frequently discussed proposals focus on agents’ contributions to a problem, their patterns of benefit from the problem, and their capacity to take constructive action now. Two influential frameworks deserve more extended treatment, notably that of Iris Marion Young concerning a social connection model for allocating responsibilities for structural injustice and that of David Miller concerning remedial responsibility (Young 2011; Miller 2007).

In contrast to the idea of responsibility as involving finding fault and individual liability, Iris Marion Young develops a forward-looking model which she argues is more appropriate. She draws on the idea that participation via institutions sometimes produces injustice, so we have particular responsibilities to address injustice. We share responsibility for addressing injustice but we may have different degrees and kinds of responsibility. She offers different parameters of reasoning that can help individuals and organizations decide what might make the most sense for them to do in efforts to remedy injustice, given that there are so many injustices, whereas time and resources are limited. Using the case study of the global apparel industry she illustrates how the fact that we are positioned differently can entail varying but important responsibilities for all who participate in activities that sustain sweatshops. There are at least four parameters that agents can use in their reasoning:

• Power: we have different levels of influence and capacities to change processes. We should focus on those areas where we have greater capacities to change worrisome structural processes. This might mean focusing on a few key players who have both greater capacity to make changes themselves and to influence others.
• Privilege: some people have more privilege than others in relation to structures. So middle-class clothing consumers have more discretionary income, choice and ability to absorb costs – they can change their clothing purchasing practices more easily than those who earn minimum wage, have little discretionary income, and little ability to absorb further costs.
• Interest: All who have an interest in changing oppressive structures have responsibilities in connection with remedying these. This entails that “victims” too have important responsibilities since they have a great interest in eliminating oppression. In a nuanced analysis she argues that they might have responsibilities in certain contexts, such as to speak out about the harsh conditions in which they work. They must take some responsibility for resisting and challenging the structures. Without their participation the need for reforms may be rationalized away or reforms may not take the required form. These obligations may not always exist, especially when the costs of resistance would require extraordinary sacrifices.
• Collective ability: In some cases we already have collective organization capacities and resources that are well established. Sometimes it just makes good practical sense to draw on these. So, for instance, sometimes student associations, faith-based organizations, unions, or stockholder groups already exercise significant power in being able to coordinate like-minded members who are willing to take certain actions. She encourages us to harness organizational resources where doing so would prove effective.

In summary, Young encourages us to think about how we can best take responsibility for reducing structural injustice by reflecting on these four parameters – different positions of power, privilege, interest and collective ability. (For comprehensive review of the merits of Young’s approach see McKeown 2018, 2021.)

David Miller offers a tremendously influential connection theory of responsibility that also discusses our remedial responsibilities. There are six ways in which we can be connected to someone, P, who needs help and so be held remedially responsible for assisting. These connections give rise to six ways in which remedial responsibility can be identified. We might be morally responsible for P’s condition; we might be outcome or causally responsible for P’s condition; we might have had no causal role in their condition but have benefited from it; we might have capacity to assist P; or we might be connected to P through ties of community. [ 4 ]

There is a huge literature on taking responsibility for remedying or preventing future global injustice, including discussing the merits of these two dominant approaches. For some other innovative contributions see, for instance, Barry and Overland 2016, Dahan, Lerner and Milman-Sivan 2023, 2016, McKeown 2018, 2021, Brock 2023.

More recently attention has focused on what those on the receiving end of injustice may permissibly do. Alejandra Mancilla (2016) argues that the needy can take what they need and use material resources for self preservation even if that requires taking from others. In doing so she expands on James Sterba’s earlier arguments against libertarians for similar conclusions (Sterba 2008, 1996). Also see (Cabrera 2004). Others like Cecil Fabre, Johan Olsthoorn, and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen argue that sometimes poor states may wage war on the affluent for subsistence (Lipper-Rasmussen 2013; Fabre 2016; Olsthoorn 2021). [Some, like Peter Unger and Gerhart Øverland argue that it is acceptable to force others to assist in poverty-alleviation under at least some circumstances (Unger 1996; Øverland 2009)].

In the global justice literature, there are also important concerns about the distribution of responsibilities among collective and individual agents. Prominently, can we hold nations responsible for global injustices or remedying such injustices? This raises important questions about collective responsibility that are well treated elsewhere in this encyclopedia (see the entry on collective responsibility ).

Is it possible to have global justice in the absence of a world state? Hobbes argues that this is not possible since there is no global authority that can secure and enforce the requirements of justice. He presents the classic so-called realist case, which is highly influential in international politics, such that there is a state of nature in the international realm. All states compete in pursuing their own advantage and since there is no global authority there can be no justice in international affairs. Also for an overview of some key work on realism in political philosophy, see the entry on political realism in international relations and Rossi and Sleat 2014.

Others are more optimistic. Since we already have a high level of interaction among states, organizations and other agents, this has generated various norms and expectations about appropriate conduct that guides behavior in the international sphere (Beitz 1999). Moreover, we have a strong interest in co-operation when this is necessary to deal practically with a range of problems that have global reach. Global governance is concerned with how we manage interests affecting the residents of more than one state in the absence of a world state. There is already a high level of co-operation among a variety of networks, organizations and other groups of interested parties at the sub-state level, and this is powerfully influencing the redesign of best practice norms in particular domains (Slaughter 2004). Some argue for a global state or democratic system – often with subsidiarity or some kind of poly-centric political order, and others argue for more limited forms of legitimate global governance (Cabrera 2018; Gould 2004, 2014; Held 2004; Kuper 2004; Buchanan and Keohane 2006).

Other change agents that can and have exercised considerable reform pressures include global social movements, such as the anti-sweatshop movement, the fair trade movement, and other ethical consumption movements. Global activism has been an important source of incremental change. These simple examples show that much more is possible in the absence of a world state than realists acknowledge.

For more on issues of world government, see the entry on world government , which provides extended treatment of this issue.

Philosophers are contributing in important ways to discussions of global justice policy issues. As illustrations, in this entry we have canvassed several institutional reform proposals for addressing global injustices which have enjoyed widespread attention, both within the academy and beyond. These include Thomas Pogge’s Health Impact Fund and Nicole Hassoun’s Global Health Impact proposals ( Section 9 ) along with Pogge’s proposal for a Global Resources Dividend ( Section 10.1 ), Christian Barry and Sanjay Reddy’s Just Linkage Proposal to help improve working conditions ( Section 4 ), Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane’s institutional innovations to secure accountability in the use of military force ( Section 3.2 ), and the innovative work of Leif Wenar concerning proposals for clean trade ( Section 10.1 ).

In addition to those illustrations already highlighted in this article, philosophers are having an impact on policy discussions in a wide range of areas including climate change and contributing ideas to the Human Development Reports (United Nations Development Programme 2020, United Nations Development Programme 2022). They have contributed to influential international multi-disciplinary projects that seek alternative ways to measure quality of health, life or poverty (Nussbaum and Sen 1993, Esposito and Hassoun 2017, Wisor et al. 2014). Philosophers have also discussed rampant abusive tax practices by corporations and wealthy individuals and how this deprives developing countries of much-needed income for human development in developing countries (Brock 2009). There are also important discussions of global income taxes, carbon taxes, financial transaction taxes and Tobin Taxes (Moellendorf 2009; Caney 2005b; Brock 2009). The pervasive problems associated with corruption have been attracting increased attention (Wenar 2016; Brock 2023). So, philosophers continue to make an important contribution to policy debates and this is also likely to be an area in which important future work on global justice will concentrate.

Philosophers are also engaging in more interdisciplinary research and global justice theorists sometimes do experimental or more broadly empirical philosophy (Miller 2001; Appiah 2007; Hassoun 2009b, 2014; Lindauer 2020; Lindauer et al. 2023; Buckland et al. 2022; Pölzler and Hannikainen 2022). Furthermore, there is some sophisticated work in related disciplines and there is significant room for fruitful interdisciplinary future research (Cappelen, Fest, Sørensen and Tungodden 2020).

Philosophers also play central roles in methodological innovation, which can in turn play an important role in informing debates about theory and public policy. As one prominent example of the contributions of new global justice methodologies, it is worth noting the emergence of “Engaged Theorizing” (see website listed under internet resources), especially in the global justice context (Ackerly 2018; Deveaux 2015, 2021; Cabrera 2010; Lu 2017; Rafanelli 2021; Reed-Sandoval 2020). Such approaches take lived experience, social action campaigns, and justice movements as the central important starting point for normative theorizing. Using interpretive, qualitative, and normative analysis, engaged political theorists try to align political philosophy with the questions, goals, and needs of communities seeking social justice. In these ways there have been important new attempts to bring philosophy to bear on our contemporary global realities, with significant progress made in bridging the divisions between theory and practice.

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Essay on Justice

Students are often asked to write an essay on Justice in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Justice

Understanding justice.

Justice is a key principle that ensures fairness and equality. It’s about treating everyone the same, regardless of their background or status. This principle is vital in maintaining peace and harmony in society.

Forms of Justice

There are different types of justice. Social justice deals with equality and fairness in society. Criminal justice involves punishing those who break the law. Distributive justice focuses on fair allocation of resources.

Importance of Justice

Justice is important because it promotes equality, creates trust, and upholds the rule of law. Without justice, there would be chaos and inequality, leading to societal unrest.

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• Speech on Justice

250 Words Essay on Justice

Introduction.

Justice, a concept that has been the backbone of civilizations, is often seen as the balancing scale of society. It is a principle that ensures fairness, equality, and moral rightness, serving as the cornerstone of legal systems worldwide.

The Concept of Justice

Justice is not a one-dimensional concept; it is multifaceted and complex. It encompasses distributive justice, which deals with the fair allocation of resources, and retributive justice, which seeks to punish wrongdoers proportionately to their crimes. Justice, in essence, is about maintaining a balance, ensuring that everyone is treated equally and fairly, regardless of their social, economic, or cultural status.

Justice in Society

In society, justice plays a critical role in maintaining order and harmony. It serves as a deterrent to unlawful behavior, fostering a sense of security and trust among individuals. However, the concept of justice is not static; it evolves with societal changes and advancements. What is deemed just in one era or culture may not hold the same significance in another, reflecting the dynamic nature of justice.

In conclusion, justice is an indispensable component of any society. It is an evolving concept that reflects societal values and norms. As we continue to advance as a society, it is crucial that our understanding and application of justice evolve too, ensuring it remains a true embodiment of fairness and equality.

500 Words Essay on Justice

Justice is a multifaceted concept that provides the fundamental basis for a harmonious and equitable society. It is the cornerstone upon which legal systems, ethical theories, and social contracts are built. At its core, justice is about fairness, impartiality, and the equitable distribution of rights and responsibilities.

The Philosophical Perspective of Justice

From a philosophical perspective, justice has been a topic of discourse since ancient times. Plato, in his work ‘The Republic’, proposed the idea of justice as harmony, where each individual plays their part in society for the common good. In contrast, Aristotle saw justice as proportionate equality, where individuals receive benefits in proportion to their contribution.

Modern philosophers have also grappled with the concept of justice. John Rawls, for instance, proposed the theory of justice as fairness, arguing that a just society is one that the least advantaged members would choose under a veil of ignorance. Robert Nozick, on the other hand, advocated for a minimalist state, arguing for justice as entitlement, where individuals are entitled to their acquisitions, provided they were obtained fairly.

Justice in Legal Systems

In legal systems, justice is the principle that guides the creation of laws and their enforcement. It aims to ensure that individuals are treated fairly and that their rights are protected. The concept of justice in legal systems is often divided into three categories: distributive justice, retributive justice, and restorative justice.

Distributive justice concerns the fair allocation of resources within a society. It argues for societal benefits and burdens to be distributed according to relevant criteria such as need, merit, or equality. Retributive justice, on the other hand, is about punishment for wrongdoing. It advocates for penalties that are proportionate to the crime. Lastly, restorative justice focuses on healing and rehabilitation. It seeks to repair the harm caused by criminal behavior through reconciliation and reintegration of offenders into society.

Justice as a Social Virtue

As a social virtue, justice plays a crucial role in maintaining social order and harmony. It ensures that individuals are treated fairly and equitably, fostering trust and cooperation among members of society. A just society is one where individuals are not only accountable for their actions but also have an equal opportunity to participate in social, economic, and political life.

In conclusion, justice is a complex and multifaceted concept that permeates various aspects of human life. Whether from a philosophical perspective, within legal systems, or as a social virtue, justice is fundamentally about fairness, equity, and the protection of rights. It is a cornerstone of a harmonious society and a guiding principle for ethical behavior. As we strive to create a more just world, it is imperative that we continue to critically engage with the concept of justice, challenging and refining our understanding of what it truly means to be just.

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Essays on Justice

Every justice essay showcases a different take on explaining justice. Ever since Antiquity philosophers understood that justice concerns all areas of human life, from common ones like the state's justice system and civil rights to private ones like individual human everyday lives, and many justice essays share this point. Some essay-writers define justice as the requirement of conformity between what a person does and what they receive in return – many essays on justice feature this definition of justice. Citizens of the same country have equal rights, freedoms, follow and are prosecuted under the same law, which makes for a uniformed justice system. Justice essay samples featured here explore justice from different points of view – make sure to review different samples of essays.

Wolterstorff considers the concept bound to justice after reflecting on two life-related events. The 1976 apartheid concerns prevalent in South Africa associates to one of the theories noted. He observed how the Afrikaners failed to extend justice to both the ‘colored’ people and the ‘blacks.’ Another event concerns the 1978...

Nozick's Theory of Justice Nozick’s theory of justice claims that, by examining its history, one can determine if goods have been distributed in a just way or not. Unlike, John Rawls theory of justice based on original agreements and structure of the society (Feibleman, 207), Nozick’s argument is historically based. The...

A Just Society A just society is the one that has a fair distribution of resources, political transparency, and fair justice to those who deserve it and an appropriate punishment for those who break the law among others. In a just society, there should be no people who are more privileged...

Factors Influencing Decision Making in the Supreme Courts There are many factors that influence the decision making in the supreme courts. There are not supposed to be any factor, but there are. Ideally, the court is supposed to be influenced only by the laws of that land, and rulings are supposed...

1. The decision to issue a writ of certiorari is made when there are suspected irregularities in a case. In this regard, an appellate court requires a lower court to submit the case record for review purposes. Higher courts exercise the discretion to determine which cases need to be reviewed. 2....

George Zimmerman’s acquittal was met with mixed reactions from the public, media, and legal analysts alike (Foreman, 2013). Although the prosecution had a seemingly strong case linking to a second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin, the defense equally had strong counterarguments to that regard. In their submissions, the defense was succinct...

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The United States Prison System The United States has among the highest rates of imprisonment in the world. The number of inmates as at 2016 was about 8 million (Markman et al., 2016). The high prison populations have been blamed for the high expenditures of the justice system. Therefore, there has...

Introduction Victimology is the study of victims of crime and the relationships between offenders and the existing criminal justice system. The study of crime victims involves an analysis of crime and criminal behavior by taking different forms. The mainstream of victimology, however, solely focuses on crime victims with an emphasis on...

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In the modern world, students have a dizzying collection of career paths that were not available in the past generations. Every graduating student faces an overwhelming range of possibilities that lie before them after completion of their campus studies. The circumstances that come with the achievement can be stressful and...

Andrew Bradford is the author of the core reading entitled "As Cape Town's Water Runs Out, The Rich Drill Wells. The Poor Worry About Eating". Bradford is a citizen of South Africa interested mainly in the factors affecting the individuals of his country who cannot afford clean drinking water. The author...

On June 6th 2018, Kim Kardashian West, wife to right-winged pundit and African American rapper Kanye West met president Trump in the Oval office and urged him to offer clemency to one Alice Marie Johnson. Convicted in 1996, for her involvement in Memphis cocaine tariffing organization with links to a...

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Justice: A Concept of Giving and Receiving What is Due Justice refers to the quality of giving and receiving what is due. The concept of justice also refers to actions that demonstrate this quality, and to people who administer laws in society. Over the years, western philosophers have attempted to define...

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The Perils of Indifference

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Allison Reefer is a young professional living in Pittsburgh, PA. She works with a refugee resettlement agency to help refugees and immigrants in the city, and she volunteers with a local shelter for human trafficking victims. She obtained her Master in International Development from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in Writing from Geneva College, focusing most of her academic work on human trafficking and migration in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In her free time, she loves to write, read, sing and play bass guitar, practice Russian, and explore her city.

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

By Louis Menand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Essay on Justice

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

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

Short and Long Justice Essay in English

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

Justice Essay 10 Lines (100 – 120 Words)

1) Justice is a concept of fairness.

2) It ensures that people are treated equally.

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

4) It is a fundamental right of every individual.

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

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

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

8) It is a balance between rights and obligations.

9) Justice should work to resolve conflicts peacefully.

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

Short Essay on Justice (250 – 300 Words)

Introduction

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

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

Advantages of Justice

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

Disadvantages of Justice

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

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

Long Essay on Justice (500 Words)

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

What Is Justice?

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

Types of Justice

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

Importance of Justice

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

The Black Side of Justice

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

How Justice can be maintained in society?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions on Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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Social Justice and Human Rights Essay

In the modern world, more and more attention is paid to social justice issues. Public justice is the fundamental principle of a peaceful and prosperous life in the country and between states. The principles of social equity are aimed at removing the barriers that arise in front of people due to various factors. It includes age, race, ethnicity, religion, culture, and the presence of a disability (Marshal et al., 2020). The international community recognizes that social development and justice can be achieved in conditions of respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Nowadays, significant progress in international investments, capital flows, and trade, along with the development of information technologies, cause globalization and interdependence. In turn, it promotes the world economy’s growth and the rise and improvement of living standards throughout the world (Malihah, 2019). In the aspect of social justice of work, emphasis is placed on guaranteeing the achievement of fair results for all through the provision of employment. Moreover, one should provide meeting fundamental rights and principles, social dialogue, and protection to workers.

It should be noted that social justice is an ambiguous concept. Public equity means receiving benefits according to merit but, at the same time, caring for the vulnerable sections of society (Yacounian & Hansson, 2020). Today, social justice can also be understood as equality before the law, social security, and considering the vital needs of the country’s population. Social equity can be called a universal human value since its manifestations are natural for any healthy society.

To conclude, social justice is one of the foundations of modern civil society. It is on par with other eternal values such as culture, knowledge, human life, peace, and morality. A country that supports social justice for its own citizens participates in the formation of an active civil society. At the same time, social justice allows citizens to feel the rule of law and equal access to their own rights and obligations.

Malihah, E. (2019). Research for social justice: Proceedings of the international seminar on research for social justice . Routledge.

Marshall, C., Pepin, C. G., & Johnson, M. (2020). Educational politics for social justice . Teachers College Press.

Yacoubian, H. A., & Hansson, L. (2020). Nature of science for social justice . Springer Nature.

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Guest Essay

Who Cares if Supreme Court Justices Get Along?

By Linda Greenhouse

Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

The Supreme Court is hurting.

I can say that with confidence — not based on any inside information but on the external evidence of how hard some of the justices are working to show that everyone on the court really does get along.

“When we disagree, our pens are sharp, but on a personal level, we never translate that into our relationship with one another,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at the National Governors Association conference in February. “We don’t raise our voices, no matter how hot-button the case is,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said at the civics forum at George Washington University in March.

The retired justice Stephen Breyer, on the talk circuit for his new book on constitutional interpretation, has been making the same point. In a guest essay in The Times this month, he observed that “justices who do not always agree on legal results nonetheless agree to go to hockey games or play golf together.” He added: “The members of the court can and do get along well personally. That matters.”

I’m reminded of the last time the court made a concerted effort to assure the public that all was well. It was during the weeks that followed the ruling that clinched the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush. With the court in recess, justices who had voted on either side of that 5-to-4 decision, Bush v. Gore, scattered around the country and the world (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to Australia), taking the occasion of previously scheduled lectures to claim that the court was not in crisis.

Justice Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia, bitterly opposed in that case and in a good many others, let it be known that they had kept up their tradition of New Year’s Eve dinner together with their spouses. “The justices are behaving almost like survivors of a natural disaster who need to talk about what happened in order to regain their footing and move on,” I wrote at the time.

Now, by contrast, there is no single issue, no giant iceberg that the court has struck, but rather separate disconcerting developments that have noticeably dented the court’s once secure public standing.

Was it the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that erased the constitutional right to abortion and upended state politics in much of the country? The astonishing leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision, which Justice Clarence Thomas called “tremendously bad” and destabilizing for the court? The controversy over the court’s seeming inability to bind itself to a judicial ethics code? The abrupt emergence of a conservative supermajority flexing its muscles so forcefully that Justice Barrett, before reaching her first anniversary on the court, felt driven to declare publicly that “this court is not composed of a bunch of partisan hacks”?

It may be a bit of each of these or none of them, but the inventory itself suggests that what matters is what the court does or doesn’t do: that the legacy of the Roberts court will reside in the pages of United States Reports, the official compilation of Supreme Court decisions, and not in the justices’ datebooks. What counts is not how the justices treat one another but how they treat the claims of those who come before them.

I’m still shaking my head, for example, over a decision from several terms ago that stripped two laywomen, teachers in elementary parochial schools, of the protection of federal anti-discrimination laws because, the 7-to-2 majority held, they were effectively “ministers” who fell under a rule the court adopted eight years earlier called the ministerial exception to ordinary civil laws. The women had no substantial religious training. One did not have her contract renewed after she revealed that she needed time off for treatment of breast cancer. The Americans With Disabilities Act did her no good. By the time the court decided the case, she had died.

Few people remember that decision from only four years ago, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, which cast thousands of lay employees of religious organizations out from a federal safety net intended for all. I mention it only to underscore the ongoing need to watch what the court does, not how the justices feel.

The Supreme Court and other appellate courts are categorized in the judicial literature as collegial courts. “Collegial” in that usage is a term of art. It doesn’t mean that the judges necessarily get along. It means that these multimember courts act as collectives, when a majority coalesces. In a forthcoming memoir, “Vision,” Judge David Tatel, who recently retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, offers as good a definition of judicial collegiality as I have seen. “Judicial collegiality,” he writes, “has nothing to do with singing holiday songs, having lunch or attending basketball games together. It has everything to do with respecting each other, listening to each other and sometimes even changing our minds.”

Years ago, Mark Alan Stamaty used a “Washingtoon,” his cartoon that ran regularly in The Washington Post, to depict the Supreme Court justices walking in single file, each carrying a bundle. “The Supreme Court Goes to the Laundromat” was the title. I thought it was so funny that I kept it for years tacked to the New York Times cubicle in the Supreme Court pressroom. It portrayed, to be sure, a collegial Supreme Court.

But it was a cartoon.

Linda Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

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For the sake of all of us, Sonia Sotomayor needs to retire from the US supreme court

She’s been described as the ‘conscience of the supreme court’. That’s why it pains me to write this

F orget Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the supreme court in my adult lifetime. The first Latina to hold the position of justice, she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.

Whether it was her lone dissent in a North Carolina voting rights case in 2016 (“the court’s conclusion … is a fiction”); her ingenious referencing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin and WEB DuBois in another 2016 dissent over unreasonable searches and seizures; or her withering observation at the Dobbs oral argument in 2021 (“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?”), Sotomayor has stood head and shoulders above both her liberal and conservative colleagues on the bench for the past 15 years.

And so it is with good reason that she has been called the “conscience of the supreme court” ( the Nation ), “the truth teller of the supreme court” ( New York Times ) and “the real liberal queen of the court” ( Above the Law ).

I happen to agree 100% with all of those descriptions. But – and it pains me to write these words – I also believe it is time for Sotomayor to retire.

Okay, now it is time to remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To recall how RBG, who had survived two bouts of cancer, refused to quit the court despite calls to do so from leading liberals during Barack Obama’s second term office. To hark back to her insistence, in multiple interviews, that it was “ misguided ” to insist she retire and that she would only stand down “ when it’s time ”. To recollect how, on her deathbed in 2020, she told her granddaughter that her “most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed” – and how it made no difference whatsoever! Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett as RBG’s replacement just eight days after her death, and Senate Republicans confirmed Barrett to RBG’s vacant seat just eight days before election day.

With Joe Biden trailing Trump in several swing states and Democrats also in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself? Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. Of course, only Sotomayor knows the full status of her health, still it is public knowledge that she has had type 1 diabetes since she was seven ; had paramedics called to her home ; and is the only sitting justice to have, reportedly , traveled with a medic. To be clear: she could easily – and God willing – survive a potential Trump second term and still be dishing out dissents from the bench come 2029.

But why take that risk? Why not retire now? Why not quit the bench at the same age that justices in Belgium, Australia and Japan are forced to do so?

Let’s deal with the three most obvious objections.

First, wouldn’t a replacement for Sotomayor that Senator Joe Manchin has to approve be less progressive, and more centrist, than our sole Latina, super-progressive justice? Perhaps. But, again, consider the alternative. Would we rather Biden replace Sotomayor with a centrist in 2024 … or Trump replace her with a far-right Federalist Society goon in 2025? Or, what if Trump doesn’t win but the Republican party takes control of the Senate and blocks a second-term Biden from replacing her between 2025 and 2028?

Second, is there really any difference between a 6-3 conservative majority on the court and a 7-2 majority? Isn’t all lost already? Not quite. The damage to our democracy from a 7-2 hard-right court would be on a whole other and existential level. Yes, 6-3 has been a disaster for our progressive priorities ( Dobbs! Bruen! Kennedy! ) but there have also been a handful of key 5-4 victories ( Redistricting ! Razor wire at the border ! Ghost guns !) in cases where Roberts plus one other conservative have come over from the dark side. None of that happens in a 7-2 court. The hard-right conservatives win not just most of the time but every single time.

Third, how can anyone on the left dare ask the first, and only, Latina justice to quit the supreme court?

It’s simple. Women in general, and Latinas especially, will suffer most from a 7-2 supreme court. It is because I am so worried about the future of minority rights in this country that I – reluctantly – want Sotomayor to step aside.

This has nothing to do with her race or her gender. Forget RBG (again). Consider Stephen Breyer. You remember Breyer, right? The bookish and bespectacled liberal justice who quit the supreme court in 2022, at the age of 83, in part because of an intense pressure campaign from the left.

The fact that he was a white man didn’t shield him from criticism – or from calls for him to stand down. In 2021, the progressive group Demand Justice sent a billboard truck to circle the supreme court building with the message: “ Breyer, retire .” I joined in, too. “Retire, retire, retire,” I said in a monologue for my Peacock show in 2021. “Or history may end up judging you, Justice Breyer.”

So why is it okay to pressure Breyer to retire but not Sotomayor? This time round, Demand Justice isn’t taking a position on whether an older liberal justice should quit while a Democratic president and Senate can still replace them and, as HuffPost reports, “on the left, there is little open debate about whether she should retire.”

Democrats, it seems, still don’t seem keen on wielding power or influence over the highest court in the nation. In 2013, Barack Obama met with RBG for lunch and tried to nudge her into retiring, but as the New York Times later reported, Obama “did not directly bring up the subject of retirement to Justice Ginsburg”.

Compare and contrast with Donald Trump. The finance journalist David Enrich, in his book Dark Towers, reveals how the Trump family carried out a “ coordinated White House charm offensive ” to persuade Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire in 2018. Trump himself, according to Vanity Fair , “worked for months to assure Kennedy his legacy would be in good hands”.

The offensive was a success. Out went self-styled moderate Kennedy, in came the hard-right political operative Brett Kavanaugh.

If there is to be a change to the supreme court in 2024, Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have only a few months left to make it happen. And yet they don’t seem too bothered about Sotomayor’s age or health. Last week, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called it “a personal decision for her to make”.

A personal decision? The prospect of a 7-2 conservative supreme court, with a far-right Federalist Soceity apparatchik having taken “liberal queen” Sotomayor’s seat on the bench, should fill us all with dread.

Biden, elected Democrats , and liberals and progressives across the board should be both publicly and privately encouraging Sotomayor to consider what she wants her legacy to be, to remember what happened with RBG, and to not take any kind of gamble with the future of our democracy.

If insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, then I’m sorry but a liberal supreme court justice about to enter her 70s and refusing to retire on a Democratic president and Democratic Senate’s watch is nothing short of insane.

Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Zeteo

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I Served on the Florida Supreme Court. What the New Majority Just Did Is Indefensible.

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade , this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!

In 2017 I authored an opinion holding unconstitutional an additional 24-hour waiting period after a woman chooses to terminate her pregnancy. Pointing out that other medical procedures did not have such requirements, the majority opinion noted, “Women may take as long as they need to make this deeply personal decision,” adding that the additional 24 hours stipulated that the patient make a second, medically unnecessary trip, incurring additional costs and delays. The court applied what is known in constitutional law as a “strict scrutiny” test for fundamental rights.

Interestingly, Justice Charles Canady, who is still on the Florida Supreme Court and who participated in the evisceration of Florida’s privacy amendment last week, did not challenge the central point that abortion is included in an individual’s right to privacy. He dissented, not on substantive grounds but on technical grounds.

So what can explain this 180-degree turn by the current Florida Supreme Court? If I said “politics,” that answer would be insufficient, overly simplistic. Unfortunately, with this court, precedent is precedent until it is not. Perhaps each of the six justices is individually, morally or religiously, opposed to abortion.

Yet, all the same, by a 4–3 majority, the justices—three of whom participated in overturning precedent—voted to allow the proposed constitutional amendment on abortion to be placed on the November ballot. (The dissenters: the three female members of the Supreme Court.) That proposed constitutional amendment:

Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion: No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion. 

For the proposed amendment to pass and become enshrined in the state constitution, 60 percent of Florida voters must vote yes.

In approving the amendment to be placed on the ballot at the same time that it upheld Florida’s abortion bans, the court angered those who support a woman’s right to choose as well as those who are opposed to abortion. Most likely the latter groups embrace the notion that fetuses are human beings and have rights that deserve to be protected. Indeed, Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, during oral argument on the abortion amendment case, queried the state attorney general on precisely that issue, asking if the constitutional language that defends the rights of all natural persons extends to an unborn child at any stage of pregnancy.

In fact, and most troubling, it was the three recently elevated Gov. Ron DeSantis appointees—all women—who expressed their views that the voters should not be allowed to vote on the amendment because it could affect the rights of the unborn child. Justice Jamie Grosshans, joined by Justice Meredith Sasso, expressed that the amendment was defective because it failed to disclose the potential effect on the rights of the unborn child. Justice Renatha Francis was even more direct, writing in her dissent:

The exercise of a “right” to an abortion literally results in a devastating infringement on the right of another person: the right to live. And our Florida Constitution recognizes that “life” is a “basic right” for “[a]ll natural persons.” One must recognize the unborn’s competing right to life and the State’s moral duty to protect that life.

In other words, the three dissenting justices would recognize that fetuses are included in who is a “natural person” under Florida’s Constitution.

What should be top of mind days after the dueling decisions? Grave concern for the women of our state who will be in limbo because, following the court’s ruling, a six-week abortion ban—at a time before many women even know they are pregnant—will be allowed to go into effect. We know that these restrictions will disproportionately affect low-income women and those who live in rural communities.

But interestingly, there is a provision in the six-week abortion ban statute that allows for an abortion before viability in cases of medical necessity: if two physicians certify that the pregnant patient is at risk of death or that the “fetus has a fatal fetal abnormality.”

The challenge will be finding physicians willing to put their professional reputations on the line in a state bent on cruelly impeding access to needed medical care when it comes to abortion.

Yet, this is the time that individuals and organizations dedicated to women’s health, as well as like-minded politicians, will be crucial in coordinating efforts to ensure that abortions, when needed, are performed safely and without delay. This is the time to celebrate and support organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and Emergency Medical Assistance , as well as our own RBG Fund , which provides patients necessary resources and information. Floridians should also take full advantage of the Repro Legal Helpline .

We all have a role in this—women and men alike. Let’s get out, speak out, shout out, coordinate our efforts, and, most importantly, vote . Working together, we can make a difference.