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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.
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.
Equity Equality Neutrality Consistency Deserts Need "Fair Share" "Fair Play" Standing Trust |
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.
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.
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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Justice is a complicated concept that at its core requires fairness.
Justice, for many people, refers to fairness. But while justice is important to almost everyone, it means different things to different groups.
For instance, social justice is the notion that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social opportunities irrespective of race, gender, or religion. Distributive justice refers to the equitable allocation of assets in society. Environmental justice is the fair treatment of all people with regard to environmental burdens and benefits.
Restorative or corrective justice seeks to make whole those who have suffered unfairly. Retributive justice seeks to punish wrongdoers objectively and proportionately. And procedural justice refers to implementing legal decisions in accordance with fair and unbiased processes.
Justice is one of the most important moral values in the spheres of law and politics. Legal and political systems that maintain law and order are desirable, but they cannot accomplish either unless they also achieve justice.
Social Contract Theory is the idea that society exists because of an implicitly agreed-to set of standards that provide moral and political rules of behavior.
Values are society’s shared beliefs about what is good or bad and how people should act.
The Veil of Ignorance is a device for helping people more fairly envision a fair society by pretending that they are ignorant of their personal circumstances.
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Anne t. and robert m. bass professor of government, justice: what's the right thing to do.
"More than exhilarating; exciting in its ability to persuade this student/reader, time and again, that the principle now being invoked—on this page, in this chapter—is the one to deliver the sufficiently inclusive guide to the making of a decent life." (Vivian Gornick, Boston Review )
“Sandel explains theories of justice…with clarity and immediacy; the ideas of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Robert Nozick and John Rawls have rarely, if ever, been set out as accessibly…. In terms we can all understand, ‘Justice’ confronts us with the concepts that lurk, so often unacknowledged, beneath our conflicts.” (Jonathan Rauch, New York Times )
“Sandel dazzles in this sweeping survey of hot topics…. Erudite, conversational and deeply humane, this is truly transformative reading.” ( Publishers Weekly , starred review)
“A spellbinding philosopher…. For Michael Sandel, justice is not a spectator sport…. He is calling for nothing less than a reinvigoration of citizenship.” (Samuel Moyn, The Nation )
“Michael Sandel, perhaps the most prominent college professor in America…practices the best kind of academic populism, managing to simplify John Stuart Mill and John Rawls without being simplistic. But Sandel is best at what he calls bringing ‘moral clarity to the alternatives we confront as democratic citizens ’…. He ends up clarifying a basic political divide -- not between left and right, but between those who recognize nothing greater than individual rights and choices, and those who affirm a ‘politics of the common good,' rooted in moral beliefs that can't be ignored.” (Michael Gerson, Washington Post)
" Justice , the new volume from superstar Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, showcases the thinking on public morality that has made him one of the most sought-after lecturers in the world." (Richard Reeves, Democracy )
“Hard cases may make bad law, but in Michael Sandel’s hands they produce some cool philosophy…. Justice is a timely plea for us to desist from political bickering and see if we can have a sensible discussion about what sort of society we really want to live in.” (Jonathan Ree, The Observer (London))
“Every once in a while, a book comes along of such grace, power, and wit that it enthralls us with a yearning to know what justice is. This is such a book.” (Jeffrey Abramson, Texas Law Review )
“Using a compelling, entertaining mix of hypotheticals, news stories, episodes from history, pop-culture tidbits, literary examples, legal cases and teachings from the great philosophers—principally, Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, Mill and Rawls—Sandel takes on a variety of controversial issues—abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action—and forces us to confront our own assumptions, biases and lazy thought…. Sparkling commentary from the professor we all wish we had.” ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review)
“Michael Sandel is…one of the world's most interesting political philosophers. Politicians and commentators tend to ask two questions of policy: will it make voters better off, and will it affect their liberty? Sandel rightly points out the shallowness of that debate and adds a third criterion: how will it affect the common good?” ( Guardian)
“Michael Sandel transforms moral philosophy by putting it at the heart of civic debate…. Sandel belongs to the tradition, dating back to ancient Greece, which sees moral philosophy as an outgrowth and refinement of civic debate. Like Aristotle, he seeks to systematize educated common sense, not to replace it with expert knowledge or abstract principles. This accounts for one of the most striking and attractive features of Justice —its use of examples drawn from real legal and political controversies…. Sandel's insistence on the inescapably ethical character of political debate is enormously refreshing.” (Edward Skidelsky, New Statesman)
“His ability to find the broad issues at the heart of everyday concerns verges on the uncanny, and his lucid explanations of classic figures such as Mill, Kant, and Aristotle are worth the price of admission.” (William A. Galston, Commonweal )
“A remarkable educational achievement…. Generations of students and educated citizens will be very well served by Sandel’s introductory overviews.” (Amitai Etzioni, Hedgehog Review )
“Reading ‘Justice’ by Michael Sandel is an intoxicating invitation to take apart and examine how we arrive at our notions of right and wrong….This is enlivening stuff. Sandel is not looking to win an argument; he's looking at how a citizen might best engage the public realm.” (Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer )
“Sandel is a champion of a politics of the common good. He wants us to think of ourselves as citizens, not just consumers or isolated choosers. For him, justice demands that we ask what kind of people and society we want (or ought) to be.” (John A. Coleman, America )
“Michael Sandel, political philosopher and public intellectual, is a liberal, but not the annoying sort. His aim is not to boss people around but to bring them around to the pleasures of thinking clearly about large questions of social policy. Reading this lucid book is like taking his famous undergraduate course ‘Justice’ without the tiresome parts, such as term papers and exams.” (George F. Will, syndicated columnist)
“ Justice is Sandel at his finest: no matter what your views are, his delightful style will draw you in, and he’ll then force you to rethink your assumptions and challenge you to question accepted ways of thinking. He calls us to a better way of doing politics, and a more enriching way of living our lives.” (E. J. Dionne, syndicated columnist)
Every society wrestles with the nature of justice, punishment, fairness, and order. The iconic image of a blindfolded woman wielding a set of scales – or sometimes a sword – has endured as a symbol around the world. Beyond a symbol, what is justice? This article covers the three main types of justice, what the earliest justice systems looked like, and the famous philosophers who developed theories of justice.
Justice refers to concepts of fairness, equality, moral behavior, lawfulness, and order. It seeks to answer questions like “What are people owed?” and “What makes a punishment just?” Everyone from philosophers to policymakers to humanitarians is interested in what justice means.
Justice can be boiled down into three types: distributive, retributive, and restorative.
Distributive justice is about the fair division of resources within a community. “Fair division” means everyone either gets or has access to the same services and physical goods. Why? The basis of distributive justice is that everyone is morally equal. Distributive justice affects areas like income, wealth, opportunities, jobs, welfare, and infrastructure. Principles of distributive justice include equity, need, and proportionality. While the basic definition of distributive justice is simple, how a society should fairly distribute resources is complex.
Retributive justice, which can also be called criminal justice, focuses on how to punish crime. It’s based on the idea that when wrongdoing is committed, the wrongdoer should get a proportionate punishment. That doesn’t mean the wrongdoer should be subjected to exactly the same ordeal (i.e. if someone hits someone in the face, they don’t need to be hit back as their formal punishment), but it needs to be proportionate. Those who study retributive justice also tend to emphasize the need for indifference, meaning that justice shouldn’t be personal or based on revenge. While many justice systems include some kind of retributive justice , its effectiveness is debatable. Considering the flaws in many criminal justice systems, retributive justice can also end up harming innocent people or unfairly punishing certain groups over others.
Restorative justice was developed in the 1970s, though many of its tenets come from Indigenous justice practices . Restorative justice focuses on helping victims of crimes, but it also wants to help offenders understand the harm they’ve caused. The goal is repair, not punishment. Engagement, accountability, cooperation, and community are all essential principles. Restorative justice practices have been used in many criminal justice cases, but they’ve also been adopted during conflicts involving families, schools, and workplaces. Unlike retributive justice, restorative justice doesn’t focus on what criminals deserve, but rather on what victims need to heal and what communities can do to prevent re-offending.
You can learn more about Justice in this course by Harvard University .
Societies have changed drastically over the millennia. Justice systems are no exception, although all have dealt with concerns like property rights, murder, theft, marriage, and so on. Here are three examples of early justice systems:
The oldest law code from Mesopotamia – known as the Code of Urukagina – is referenced in other texts, but no copies exist today. We know more about the Code of Ur-Nammu (2100-2050 BCE), which is named after the ruler Ur-Nammu. The Code, which consists of 57 laws, establishes fines for all punishments except capital offenses, which are dealt with more harshly. The Code of Hammurabi , named after the first king of Babylon, is more famous than the earlier Ur-Nammu code. Through its 282 rules involving marriage, inheritances, crimes, punishment, violence, and more, Hammurabi’s code established a comprehensive legal code. Unlike Ur-Nammu’s code, Hammurabi’s tended to adopt an “eye for an eye” framework. This included harsh punishments like the cutting off of eyes, ears, tongues, and hands. It also said someone accused of a crime should be considered innocent until proven guilty. It’s believed that the Code of Hammurabi inspired other ancient justice systems.
What about a court system ? In Mesopotamian society, disputes between individuals could be settled privately, but if that wasn’t possible, they could go to court. There were no lawyers, however. A local council would hear a case, followed by a judge or a court. Local courts tended to deal with civil and criminal cases, such as theft and property issues. Only men served in the courts.
Ancient Egyptian law was based on the concept of ma’at, which means harmony. Egyptians even had a goddess named Ma’at , who personified truth, justice, and harmony. She held the universe in balance. Without her, everything would descend into chaos, which to Egyptians was the same as injustice. Ma’at was also an important figure in the Afterlife. After a person died, they would travel to the Hall of Judgement where their heart was weighed on a scale against Ma’at’s feather of truth. If their heart was balanced, they could continue to the Afterlife. If it didn’t, the person ceased to exist.
Historians haven’t found an ancient Egyptian code like the Code of Ur-Nammu or Hammurabi, so specifics are unknown. We do know that religious principles governed Egyptian law , so the king, as a god on earth, served as society’s top judge. There were also local courts that dealt with village concerns. Land, water rights, and other property issues were common. Those accused of crimes were considered guilty until proven innocent, so if someone made a false accusation and was found out, punishments were harsh. In ancient Egyptian society, justice was about avoiding chaos, so anything that threatened harmony was met with severe consequences. Murder, tomb-robbing, and rape were punished with death or mutilation.
Confucius, who we’ll learn more about shortly, had a major impact on ancient China’s view of justice and law. Confucius and his disciples believed a harmonious society depended on five relationships . These were the relationships between a ruler and subject, a husband and wife, a father and son, an older and younger brother, and a friend and friend. When everyone worked on being a good person, cared for these relationships, and fulfilled their responsibilities, society wouldn’t even need strict laws or punishments.
The imperial Chinese code during the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE) rejected Confucius’ teachings in favor of Legalism, which taught that humans were naturally violent. To prevent humans from falling into their natural, evil state, Legalism taught that the government needed to take full control. Li Si, the counselor to the first emperor, created a harsh code following the unification of China. The emperor appointed district officials who served as judges and investigators. Those accused of crimes were guilty until proven innocent while trials didn’t have lawyers or juries. Punishments varied based on the crime, but many were harsh. Fines, hard labor, beatings, and banishment were doled out for minor violations. Serious crimes were punished with mutilations, castration, and death. When the Han Dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE) made Confucianism the state philosophy, China’s justice system softened.
The earliest justice systems didn’t come from thin air; many were deeply impacted by influential philosophers. Philosophy has continued to play a leading role in how society develops and deploys justice. As justice is one of history’s most discussed topics, it’s challenging to distill it to just a few figures. There are many other important thinkers not included in the following list, but the four here are a good starting point.
We’ve already discussed Confucius a little, but there are a few other things worth knowing about his views on justice and law . He based everything on the belief that humans were naturally good, which meant they understood the difference between right and wrong and were drawn to doing the right thing. They still needed guidance, however, but instead of specific laws, Confucius advocated for a code of ethics that included Five Constants and Four Virtues. These included Zhong (loyalty) and Yi (justice and righteousness). By following this code of ethics and maintaining a hierarchy of authority (sons obey fathers, younger brothers obey older brothers, and wives obey husbands), Confucius believed strict justice systems wouldn’t be necessary. In Confucius’ view, justice is about ethical behavior (which comes naturally to humans) and maintaining hierarchies.
Plato built on his teacher Socrates’ ideas about justice and the belief that absolute truths exist. Because absolute truth exists, Plato believed justice couldn’t be subjective. Balance and control were essential, as well as a hierarchy. Plato’s vision of a “just” society had three classes: craftspeople, auxiliaries, and guardians. The guardians were in charge, but to achieve justice, all classes must embody certain virtues. Craftspeople should be temperate, auxiliaries should be courageous, and guardians should be wise. In Plato’s mind, only guardians – who were led by a philosopher king – could understand what justice looked like. Like Confucius, Plato’s concept of justice depends on groups staying in a hierarchy and living moral lives.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who is considered one of the modern West’s most influential figures, centered his ideas about justice on freedom . In his view, freedom is what gives human beings our dignity; it’s our only innate right. All laws must be created through the lens of freedom, bearing in mind that people don’t have the right to infringe on the freedom of others. For Kant, the only moral laws were laws that saw people as free, equal, and independent. What about crime and punishment? Kant believed in retributive justice and lex talonis, which is the theory that punishments need to inflict similar harm as the wrong done. If someone commits murder, death is the only equivalent punishment. Kant does also advocate for forgiveness, however, saying that repaying a wrong out of revenge or hatred is not virtuous. Kant devoted a good deal of his work to justice, applying his theories to private, private, and international law.
In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, which is one of the 20th century’s most important books. In this book, Rawls sought to define what a just society looks like. He performed a thought experiment where a group of people live behind “a veil of ignorance.” The veil hides the differences between the individuals, such as their social, economic, gendered, racial, and historical differences. With no outside influences, people wouldn’t try to benefit one group over another. Eventually, the group would settle on two principles. The first states that everyone has the same basic liberties that can’t be taken away, but that may be limited only if someone’s liberties are infringing on those of another person. Rawls’ second principle focuses on equality, including equal opportunities to hold private and public offices, as well as equal (or as close to equal as possible) wealth distribution. To be just, a society must reduce inequalities as best as it can. Rawls called his theory “justice as fairness.” His ideas have been very influential in academic discussions about social justice and human rights, as well as policy-making.
About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.
Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.
Students are often asked to write an essay on Social 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.
Let’s take a look…
Understanding social justice.
Social justice is the fair treatment of all people in society. It’s about making sure everyone has equal opportunities, irrespective of their background or status.
Social justice is important because it promotes equality. It helps to reduce disparities in wealth, access to resources, and social privileges.
Every person can contribute to social justice. By treating others fairly, respecting diversity, and standing against discrimination, we can promote social justice.
In conclusion, social justice is vital for a balanced society. It ensures everyone has a fair chance to succeed in life.
Social justice, a multifaceted concept, is the fair distribution of opportunities, privileges, and resources within a society. It encompasses dimensions like economic parity, gender equality, environmental justice, and human rights. The core of social justice is the belief that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social opportunities irrespective of race, gender, or religion.
Social justice is pivotal in fostering a harmonious society. It ensures that everyone has access to the basic necessities of life and can exercise their rights without discrimination. It is the cornerstone of peace and stability in any society. Without social justice, the divide between different socio-economic classes widens, leading to social unrest.
Despite its importance, achieving social justice is fraught with challenges. Systemic issues like discrimination, poverty, and lack of access to quality education and healthcare are significant roadblocks. These challenges are deeply ingrained in societal structures and require collective efforts to overcome.
Every individual plays a crucial role in promoting social justice. Through conscious efforts like advocating for equal rights, supporting policies that promote equality, and standing against discrimination, individuals can contribute to building a just society.
In conclusion, social justice is a fundamental principle for peaceful coexistence within societies. Despite the challenges, each individual’s conscious effort can contribute significantly to achieving this noble goal. The journey towards social justice is long and arduous, but it is a path worth treading for the betterment of humanity.
Introduction to social justice, origins and evolution of social justice.
The concept of social justice emerged during the Industrial Revolution and subsequent civil revolutions as a counter to the vast disparities in wealth and social capital. It was a call for societal and structural changes, aiming to minimize socio-economic differences. The term was first used by Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli in the mid-19th century, influenced by the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Since then, the concept has evolved and expanded, encompassing issues like environmental justice, health equity, and human rights.
Social justice rests on four essential pillars: human rights, access, participation, and equity. Human rights are the fundamental rights and freedoms to which all individuals are entitled. Access involves equal opportunities in terms of resources, rights, goods, and services. Participation emphasizes the importance of all individuals contributing to and benefiting from economic, social, political, and cultural life. Equity ensures the fair distribution of resources and opportunities.
Despite the progress, numerous challenges to social justice persist. Systemic and structural discrimination, political disenfranchisement, economic inequality, and social stratification are just a few. Moreover, the rise of populism and nationalism worldwide has further complicated the fight for social justice, as these ideologies often thrive on division and inequality.
Promoting social justice requires collective action. Individuals can contribute by becoming more aware of the injustices around them, advocating for policies that promote equity, and standing up against discrimination. Education plays a crucial role in this process, as it can foster a deeper understanding of social justice issues and equip individuals with the tools to effect change.
That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.
Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .
Happy studying!
The textbook “ Policing in the U.S. Past, Present, and Future ” takes a fresh look at contemporary policing issues. The book examines police topics while adding perspective and context and expanding the typical sound-bite explanations of interactions between the police and the community.
Written from a social justice perspective, this book addresses controversial issues in policing in a fair and balanced way with the intention of presenting detailed information. The text pulls no punches and focuses on levels of accountability and professional responsibility. This book will allow students to rethink traditional policing strategies and consider more efficient, user-friendly methods of providing unbiased police services in all communities. But why do so many people take offense to the term “social justice”? Let’s look at that term.
It has increasingly become a badge of honor for activists to claim a social justice stance in their advocacy. Several scholars and policy makers have also cited social justice as a foundation for their views. Numerous educators have been teaching from a social justice lens to give alternatives to traditional ways of viewing the criminal justice system. Many people who feel that the traditional justice system has failed them have also touted the need for a social justice paradigm shift. But what exactly is social justice, and how does it work? Regardless of how often this term is used, it is often unclear in any practical sense what it means when someone mentions the term social justice or how it influences policies, curriculum, and grass roots advocacy.
First, if we can agree on a working definition of the word “justice,” then we will have a good starting point. I offer the definition of justice being the ethical & philosophical idea that people should be treated fairly, properly, and reasonably by the law and the government agents that carry out the law. It’s worth noting that with justice comes accountability. Justice has many parts, but I will focus on two. The first part of justice deals with fair process. The fair process can be linked back to the 14 th amendment and equal protection under the law. This is the process of determining how fairly people are being treated by the CJ system (procedural justice). The second part deals with fair and adequate outcomes. Equality is the fundamental ideal … similarly situated people should receive similar outcomes (distributive justice).
Once we agree on the concepts of justice, then we can begin to look at the concept of social justice. The term social justice can be explained as the equal distribution of benefits and burdens throughout society. People are inherently absorbed in their own self-interest. Social exchange theory suggests that people are self-interested in their judgments and choices. Social justice tries to refocus the attention on rewards, punishment, and accountability equally across society. This is an ideal that most could agree with.
Social justice is as much about accountability as it is about equity. People need to be held accountable for their actions and no one is above the law. As the book “Policing in the U.S.: Past, Present, and Future” tries to give a critical framework to students who may go into policing, we also want them to become ethical decision makers in the field. This social justice perspective helps protect everyday people from those who would commit crimes or prey on them, and it helps the police better serve the community in procedurally just ways.
The concept of social justice also helps good police officers by not having them lumped in with the misdeeds of rogue officers. In many ways, social justice can be viewed in the same manner as body-worn cameras; it goes beyond what is alleged and helps people see the true story. Social justice is rooted in procedural justice and can be an instrument to help build bridges between the police and the communities that they serve. “ Policing in the U.S.: Past, Present, and Future ” teaches students that “social justice” is not a term to be feared or misunderstood. In fact, it is a term to be embraced in a search for true justice and equity as students embark on a career in policing in the U.S.
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Published August 26, 2024
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No, I'm not going to analyse the alleged "nominee"'s speech. This précis of what's going on is hard to beat :
Kamala got zero votes, has given zero press conferences, has given zero interviews, and had to stage buying a bag of Doritos. This is the most ridiculous, anti-democratic, laughable joke I've ever seen in politics.
If you treat this as "politics", you're part of the problem. And, given that American elections have degraded to the point where the opposition candidate is now being indicted, convicted and shot at, I find myself more interested in the disturbing abandonment by key US institutions of all remaining norms. For example:
As longtime readers and listeners and viewers well know, I never utter the words "Department of Justice" without prefacing it with the adjectives "dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt". If I were running for president, my platform would include a pledge to break it up: as currently constituted, its tentacles include the FBI (currently "investigating" the Trump near-assassination - yeah, sure) and the Bureau of Prisons (the fellows charged with ensuring that the security cameras aren't working and the guards are asleep when high-value prisoners get the urge to turn suicidal).
But what they call "Main Justice" is the core racket. As my friend Conrad Black, one of its victims, put it over a decade ago:
Those who do exercise their constitutional right to a defense receive three times as severe a sentence as those who plead guilty; 95 percent of cases are won by prosecutors, 90 percent of those without trial.
Those last two numbers have ticked up even higher in the years since, but that first one is important too: if you insist on your "constitutional" ( ha! ) right to a defence and it pans out as the ninetysomething stats suggest, you'll be gaoled for thirty years instead of ten. They'll punish you for having the temerity to insist on being tried and convicted according to due process.
In June, in the Northern District of California, something rather unusual happened: the defendants actually beat the rap. They were two British subjects - Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, respectively the founder and finance honcho of a UK company called Autonomy. In 2018 the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US Department of Justice had indicted the pair for "conspiracy" and "fraud" over the company's sale to Hewlett Packard - and, after some protracted Julian Assange-like extradition jousting, the two were put on a 'plane to America and placed under house arrest.
And then on June 6th a San Francisco jury found Lynch and Chamberlain not guilty of all charges . On July 28th, back in Britain, Mr Lynch gave his first interview about his ordeal :
Cleared UK tech tycoon feared he would die in US jail if convicted
Less than a month later, he is dead. To celebrate his acquittal, he took a party of friends and family (including his trial attorney Christopher Morvillo) on a Mediterranean cruise, and on Monday his luxury yacht sank off Sicily.
Must be pretty sad for his co-defendant, right?
Well, no. Because he's dead too. On Saturday Stephen Robinson went for his morning run in Cambridgeshire and, six miles into it, was hit by a car. He was pronounced dead on Monday - the same day Mike Lynch died.
In The Spectator , Conrad Black's former underling (and my former overling) Charles Moore writes:
Mike Lynch and I were due to have lunch next month. When we last communicated, he was buoyant after vindicating his innocence in the Californian courts. Now he is the victim of a horror out of classical myth, almost of Charybdis itself, and with him his dear daughter Hannah. How can his poor wife, Angela, who survived the shipwreck, bear such losses? Mike's yacht Bayesian was named after Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century Presbyterian minister whose theorem Mike admired. According to Wikipedia, the theorem 'gives a mathematical rule for inverting conditional probabilities, allowing us to find the probability of a cause given its effect'. What on earth is the probable cause of this brilliant man's fate, with its triumphs and its weird tragedy?
Charles is right. Charybdis, you'll recall (if anybody still does, given the state of western education), was a sea-monster who belched out giant whirlpools of water off the coast of Sicily. Which is precisely what happened to Lynch's yacht. Off the coast of Sicily. If you incline less mythologically and more scientifically, and you're pondering the Bayesian probabilities of what happened to the Bayesian, the headline of the BBC's not terribly helpful "explainer" will read a little ironic :
Bayesian sinking: The key questions for investigators
It was, per the Beeb's "experts", a "black swan" event. According to the lead invesigator in Italy, Salvo Cocina, "they were in the wrong place at the wrong time " - although he also noted that another vessel, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, was in the same place at the same time, and emerged unscathed. As Steyn Clubber Nigel Sherratt comments:
The loss of 'Bayesian' is indeed a mystery. A waterspout off Sicily should be no real danger to a 184 foot fully crewed, well founded and managed modern yacht at anchor. It's hardly Sir Robin alone on Suhaili against the Southern Ocean. 'Sir Robert Baden Powell' a smaller (albeit still 138 foot) gaff topsail schooner anchored nearby came through with no problems and helped with rescue efforts. Superstitious sailors might think that naming a yacht 'Bayesian' was tempting fate...
Meanwhile, back in Cambridgeshire, with the English constabulary's usual flair for le mot non-juste , Stephen Chamberlain's demise was characterised as follows :
Death of tycoon's ex-partner not 'untoward' - police
"Untoward", huh? It is a somewhat flexible word, and my dictionaries to hand define it variously as unseemly, unexpected, unfortunate, improper and/or inconvenient. Indeed, the death of Mr Chamberlain is not "inconvenient", although it seems odd that the Cambridgeshire constabulary would announce it as such in public. Between 2013 and 2022, thirty-eight pedestrians died on the county's roads, which is under four per year - and none in this particular neck of the woods.
So the US Department of Justice lost the case, but two months later, and on the same day, both defendants are dead anyway, along with one of their victorious lawyers. "In the course of forty-eight hours, I can't process what has happened," says their surviving attorney, Gary Lindberg , "but both of our clients, as well as Chris and his wife, are gone."
Mr Lynch was fifty-nine, Mr Chamberlain fifty-two. They fought the DOJ, and the DOJ won.
Striking - and way beyond any probabilities, Bayesian or otherwise.
Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here . Sales help fund JWR )
© 2024 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc.
The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel
O n October 7 , Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas’s exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?
The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.
One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”
Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it “makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-colonial regimes.” When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial ‘domicide,’ making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands.” Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the “hyper-visible Palestine case … provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly.” Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that “the world is an unequal place” where “marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice.”
Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.
T he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.
Read: The curious rise of settler colonialism and Turtle Island
For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider “terra nullius,” the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.
When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being “no one’s land,” Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.
Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate . In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.
In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.” Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.
China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.
These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet’s residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”
Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—like India’s rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.
But the focus on Israel-Palestine isn’t only a product of the discipline’s limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.
I srael also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.
Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”
This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it.”
For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the “rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite.” The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about “Zionists,” who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics.”
In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred , sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.
Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism , that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, “profiteering and usury.” Anti-Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools,” used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.
The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—the circumcision of the heart, a new law “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false
Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’” except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.
When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”
As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.
This essay is adapted from Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice .
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Ms. Snyder is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of the book “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.”
In 2018, a Black teenager named Chrystul Kizer shot and killed a 34-year-old white man named Randall Volar III, who had sexually abused and trafficked her starting when she was 16 years old; she was 17 at the time of the killing. This week, a Wisconsin judge sentenced her to 11 years in prison, with another five under supervision. Rather than serving justice, her case illustrates with searing clarity the sexism and racism that corrupt our criminal justice system.
In a 2019 investigation , The Washington Post detailed Ms. Kizer’s life: Her single mother, who struggled to support her four children. The abusive man and the family’s time in a homeless shelter. Ms. Kizer wanted money for snacks and school notebooks, so she placed an ad in an online forum called backpage.com , which was notorious for sex trafficking. (It has since been shut down.) Mr. Volar was the first one who answered. He showered her with gifts and took her to fancy dinners; she understood there was a price to these extravagances. But before long, she said he was taking her to hotels to have sex with other men. He’d wait outside for her and insist she turn the money over to him. He called himself an “escort trainer.” One night, when he wanted to have sex and she brushed him off, she said she fell to the ground and he jumped on top of her, trying to force off her clothes. She shot him twice in the head, and then, the police said, set his body on fire.
Ms. Kizer’s case has been in the national spotlight since she killed Mr. Volar; a petition to drop her charges garnered more than a million and a half signatures. In what was a major win for her side, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that she could argue that her crime was justified because she was trafficked by Mr. Volar — a groundbreaking ruling for trafficking victims. In order to make that argument, however, she would have to take her chances on a long, difficult, very public trial. Or she could take a plea deal.
Four months before his death, Mr. Volar had been arrested after another young girl called 911 claiming he’d drugged her and was threatening to kill her. The police searched his home and found hundreds of videos of sexual abuse. He had a penchant for Black girls, like Ms. Kizer: Hers was among those young faces found in the videos. Mr. Volar was released without bail the same day, pending an investigation. The police saw girls in the videos that looked as young as 12 and 13, and yet, “In many and most of the cases, we didn’t know the age,” the prosecutor Michael Graveley told The Post . “So we literally did not know whether we had misdemeanors or felony.”
In other words, the girls were young enough to appear young, but apparently not so young that they warranted priority.
Imagine a Black man, aged 34. Imagine him with videos of young white boys who appear to be 12, 13, 14 years old. Imagine those videos contained footage of grown men having sex with young boys. Imagine that 20 of those videos were shot by the suspect himself. Now tell me: In what world does law enforcement let such a person go free without bail? In what world do investigators hold on to those videos for months, seemingly baffled by the task of finding out the ages of the girls? In what world is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony an excuse for this level of inaction?
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The Justice Department, together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today against RealPage Inc. for its unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments. RealPage’s alleged conduct deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans. The lawsuit was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina and alleges that RealPage violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.
The complaint alleges that RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software. This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information. The complaint further alleges that in a free market, these landlords would otherwise be competing independently to attract renters based on pricing, discounts, concessions, lease terms, and other dimensions of apartment leasing. RealPage also uses this scheme and its substantial data trove to maintain a monopoly in the market for commercial revenue management software. The complaint seeks to end RealPage’s illegal conduct and restore competition for the benefit of renters in states across the country.
“Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “We allege that RealPage’s pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents. Using software as the sharing mechanism does not immunize this scheme from Sherman Act liability, and the Justice Department will continue to aggressively enforce the antitrust laws and protect the American people from those who violate them.”
“Today’s complaint against RealPage illustrates our corporate enforcement strategy in action. We identify the most serious wrongdoers, whether individuals or companies, and focus our full energy on holding them accountable,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “By feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices — undermining competition and fairness for consumers in the process. Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law. Today’s action makes clear that we will use all our legal tools to ensure accountability for technology-fueled anticompetitive conduct.”
“RealPage’s egregious, anticompetitive conduct allows landlords to undermine fair pricing and limit housing options while stifling necessary competition,” said Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer. “The Department remains committed to rooting out illegal schemes and practices aimed at empowering corporate interests at the expense of consumers.”
“As Americans struggle to afford housing, RealPage is making it easier for landlords to coordinate to increase rents,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “Today, we filed an antitrust suit against RealPage to make housing more affordable for millions of people across the country. Competition – not RealPage – should determine what Americans pay to rent their homes.”
The complaint cites internal documents and sworn testimony from RealPage and commercial landlords that make plain RealPage’s and landlords’ objective to maximize rental pricing and profitability at the expense of renters. For example:
The complaint alleges that RealPage’s agreements and conduct harm the competitive process in local rental markets for multi-family dwellings across the United States. Armed with competing landlords’ data, RealPage also encourages loyalty to the algorithm’s recommendations through, among other measures, “auto accept” functionality and pricing advisors who monitor landlords’ compliance. As a result, RealPage’s software tends to maximize price increases, minimize price decreases, and maximize landlords’ pricing power. RealPage also trained landlords to limit concessions (e.g., free month(s) of rent) and other discounts to renters. The complaint also cites internal documents from RealPage and landlords touting the fact that landlords have responded by reducing renter concessions.
The complaint separately alleges that RealPage has unlawfully maintained its monopoly over commercial revenue management software for multi-family dwellings in the United States, in which RealPage commands approximately 80% market share. Landlords agree to share their competitively sensitive data with RealPage in return for pricing recommendations and decisions that are the result of combining and analyzing competitors’ sensitive data. This creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that strengthens RealPage’s grip on the market and makes it harder for honest businesses to compete on the merits.
RealPage Inc., is a property management software company headquartered in Richardson, Texas.
An executive of a steel distributor in Carolina, Puerto Rico, pleaded guilty today to conspiring with competitors to fix prices for sales of reinforcing bar, or rebar.
The Justice Department, Department of Labor (DOL), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have signed an interagency memorandum of understanding (MOU) to further communication and coordination...
Thank you, Deputy Attorney General Monaco.
I would like to reiterate the Attorney General’s and the Deputy Attorney General’s thanks to the leadership and staff of the Antitrust Division. They...
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