SOCIAL JUSTICE

Abstract
Social justice is a philosophical and trans-disciplinary concept that has no particular or distinct
disciplinary home. Social justice in theory and practice is part of the general evolution of justice
in human civilizations, which is a part of the ongoing struggles against the repression of any
people and on behalf of the liberation of all people. The applications of social justice are best
understood in relation to the applications of equal justice and restorative justice.

Introduction
Social justice is a philosophical and transdisciplinary concept that has no particular or distinct
disciplinary home. Within and without the domains of criminology, both the struggle for and
the study of social justice are underdeveloped and/or unfinished projects. Presently, the
constitution of social justice and how to secure human rights for all are not firmly established
or agreed upon by most people. Nevertheless, a listing of the basic liberties of social justice
includes freedom of ideas, thoughts, and speech; freedom of association; freedom of ethnic
and religious culture; freedom from slavery; freedom from racism, sexism, and discrimination;
the right to equality and human needs for all; and the redistribution of power, wealth, and
status for all, and for entire societies (Sadeghi and Price, 2007).

Over the short term, the struggle for social justice has reflected the historical changes and
continuities that helped to form the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by
the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. Drawing on the battle cry of the French
Revolution, ‘dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood’; on the demands of the Industrial
Revolution for political, social, and economic equity; and, finally, on the communal and national
solidarity movements associated with the postcolonial era, the articles of the UDHR brought
together in one document the universal meanings of human rights.

This struggle for universal human rights within the evolution of justice has not followed
anything resembling a linear pathway forward in time and space. Not only has every generation
of rights met with resistance, but also major strides on the course to human rights efficacy have
also experienced some kind of backlash or setback. To be sure, reactionary forces have not
typically nullified each progressive chapter in the acquisition of human rights. In fact, the
collective evidence is otherwise: “History preserves the human rights record as each generation
builds on the hopes and achievements of its predecessors while struggling to free itself from
authoritarianism and improve its social conditions” for the future (Ishay, 2004: p. 4).

Background
Social justice may be thought of simply as “the common good through the equalization of
goods or services” (Sadeghi and Price, 2007: p. 4), or it may be more elaborately defined as “the
fair distribution of opportunities, rewards and responsibilities in society, as well as principles
and institutions for the distribution of meaningful social goods – income, shelter, food, health,
education, the freedom to pursue individual goals” (Hudson, 2013: p. 432).

An Italian Catholic priest, Luigi Taparelli, coined the term ‘social justice.’ In his book, Theoretical
Treatise on Natural Law (published between 1840 and 1843), and based on the teachings of
Thomas Aquinas, he claimed that the components of social justice were products of “natural
theology, in which morality, based on religion, ought to be sought after by all people, who,
under God, must adhere to their moral beliefs in doing what is right” (Sadeghi and Price, 2007:
p. 699). In 1948, the late Father William J. Ferree (1997) in his “The Act of Social Justice” had
characterized social justice as the duty in which each person in society is morally obligated to
care for the common good of all.

Probably the most influential theory of social justice has been John Rawls’ notion of “justice as
fairness” in his A Theory of Justice (1972), which draws upon both the basic social contract
theory and the Kantian philosophical tradition of justice as impartiality. Like most theorists on
social justice, Rawls focused his concerns on answering two fundamental questions. “First, how
the rules for a fair distribution of meaningful social goods can be determined; second, how
much or how little inequality is permissible in a socially just society” (Hudson, 2013: p. 432). In
response to the first question, Rawls answers that the rules and institutions of a just society can
be obtained only by people acting in an unnatural position of ignorance of their own position,
or behind a “veil of ignorance.” Accordingly, he is suggesting that a fair distribution can only
come about by establishing rules or procedures designed for the purposes of securing
impartiality as much as possible. With respect to the question of inequality versus equality or to
Rawls’s “principle of difference,” which maintains that social and economic inequalities are just
to the extent that they benefit everyone.

In answering these questions, Rawls sought to strike a balance between equality and freedom.
Alternative theories usually prioritize one or the other. For example, Marxist theories line up
behind equality; libertarian and neoliberal theories line up behind freedom. A variant of welfare
liberalism articulated by Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice (1983) defends pluralism and
equality, wherein he argues that diverse goods and services should have different degrees of
social distribution on the basis of individual need.

On The ‘Evolution Of Justice’: Equal, Restorative, And Social

Justice is an evolving phenomenon in its ideation, ideology, and implementation. As social
constructions and ideal systems, justice discourses and practices cannot be separated from the
modern evolution of law, justice, and society – or of what can be described as a three-tier
revolution in just-ology or in the entitlement of all human beings to share the exact same
formal rights as everybody else regardless of their class, race or ethnicity, gender, religious,
national, or sexual affiliation (Ishay, 2004). When each of these models or systems of justice first
emerged, they represented a particular stage in the struggle to expand individual rights in
relation to both the collective rights of societies and the rights of the nation-states. Ultimately,
these rights were extended to all peoples as universal human rights.
The first generation of rights represented the struggle for ‘equal justice’ or the struggle for
‘negative rights.’ These called for a restraint from uninhibited state or monarchial power over
the individual. This generation of rights was derived from the American and French Revolutions,
which both struggled to gain freedom from arbitrary rule. Collectively, these rights, articulated
more recently in the Civil and Political Rights of the International Bill of Rights (1966), have
shaped governmental control by “rule of law” rather than “rule of man.” In the domains of crime
and crime control, these rights have at least formally established an impartial and fair
enforcement of the procedural and substantive components of the criminal and civil laws.

The second generation of rights represented the struggle for ‘restorative justice’ or the struggle
for ‘positive rights.’ These called for ‘affirmative’ actions by and/or on behalf of the state for
pursuing the common welfare. Rooted in the struggles to democratize governments and to
make them responsible to the needs of people living in ‘post’ laissez-faire monopoly societies as
a whole, these rights have shaped the sociopolitical obligations or minimal duties of the state to
facilitate the self-actualization of individual human beings (Barak, 1980). These rights were also
collectively articulated in 1966, in the Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of the International
Bill of Rights. In the domains of crime and crime prevention, these have included an emphasis
on community social welfare, penitence and redemption, and offender–victim reconciliation.

The third generation of rights is represented by the contemporary worldwide struggle for ‘social
justice,’ or the struggle for universal human rights. Evolving out of the emerging conditions of
global interdependence, these rights call for international rules of interaction, such as the
establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 1999. These universal rights
also recognize that the delivery of negative and positive rights for all cannot be satisfied within
the body of individual states acting alone. In the universal struggle for social justice, world
peace, and victim reduction, global emphases have been on ending world hunger, forgiving
debt to underdeveloped nations, and treating victims of AIDS/HIV and other debilitating and/or
life-threatening diseases, famines, tsunamis, and so forth worldwide.

Equal Justice
In most developed nations like the United States, equal justice assumes the rationality of the
prevailing political, economic, and social arrangements in general and of the administration of
criminal justice in particular. Within those systems of justice, where criminals are viewed as
‘bad’ and ‘mad,’ they are typically disconnected from their social conditions and from their class,
racial or ethnic, gendered, and sexual relations. Whether defendants are from at-risk social
environments or from privileged milieus, these facts are not formally relevant to the accused or
convicted offenders as all are subject to the same ‘equal justice’ or due process of the law.

Ignoring the effects of social structures and ecologies of crime, these models of equal justice
have traditionally not considered the interests of either the injured parties or their perpetrators
or the communities from which they originate. Furthermore, the policies of equal justice do not
take into account the concept of equal sanctions for unequal offenders or victims. Similarly, the
unequal treatment of analogous social injuries or harms perpetrated by the powerful and the
powerless, respectively, serve to reproduce the status quo of crime, victimization, and
discriminatory justice for many.

The contemporary model of equal justice practices in the United States has its roots in the mid-
eighteenth century, when the European Age of Reason or Enlightenment was busy reforming
the excessively arbitrary and barbaric justice practices from the medieval period. Although not
driven by revenge or vengeance, these utilitarian and practical applications of equalformal
(retributive) justice are repressive as these help to perpetuate a class of marginally ‘dangerous’
offenders. At the same time, these policies of equal criminal justice downplay the value for
most rule violators of flexible sentencing and community alternatives to imprisonment.

Restorative Justice
Fundamentally, restorative justice systems are about decentering punishment in regulatory
institutions. At the same time, restorative justice acknowledges the place that punishment has
as a means of communicating the ‘shamefulness’ of the acts in question (Braithwaite et al.,
2006). Restorative policies and practices of justice assume that most offenders and
nonoffenders, whether perpetrators, victims, or both, fundamentally share an intrinsic
humanity (Zehr and Mika, 1998).

Modern practices of restorative justice have their legal roots in the ancient patterns of such
diverse cultures as the Sumerian Code of UrNammu (2050 BC), the Hebrew Scriptures and the
Code of Hammurabi (1700 BC), the Roman Law of the Twelve Tribes (449 BC), and the earliest
collection of the Germanic tribal laws, the Lex Salica (AD 496). Each of these legal systems
required that offenders and their families settle accounts with victims and their families, not
simply to ensure that injured persons received restitution or compensation but also to ensure
that communities were reestablished or restored to their former peace. Similarly, in many
precolonial and indigenous societies around the world, sanctions were also primarily
compensatory rather than retributive, intended primarily to make victims whole or to restore
them to their previous status (Barak et al., 2010).

Restorative justice is being pursued when the focus of justice is on the harms of wrongdoing
more than the rules that have been broken, and on the victims and offenders working toward
the restoration of the former and the support of the latter in understanding their
transgressions and meeting their obligations to make things right again; and is aimed at
empowering those affected parties in the processes of justice and dialogue. For example,
contemporary systems of Japanese justice, which emphasize ‘confession, repentance, and
absolution,’ are about compensating their victims and restoring community peace (Van Ness
and Heetderks-Strong, 1997).

Today, the idea of restorative justice has come to have many different meanings and practices.
It has come to be associated with innovations in community mediation, problem-solving justice,
victim–offender reconciliation, alternative sentencing, and community service (Daly and
Immarigeon, 1998). Regardless of the myriad of practices that seem to be part of a larger
movement to incorporate restorative justice programs into communities, they all share in
common the desire to move beyond the illegality of the crime to the more fundamental needs
of human dignity and respect as well as to the mediated sources of conflict and dispute
resolution.

Unlike equal justice systems that revolve around how much pain and suffering have been
inflicted by the actions of the wrongdoer, restorative justice systems revolve around how much
harm has been repaired or will be prevented (‘less harm’). Restorative justice systems are
preoccupied with both the interpersonal and larger structural-mutualistic relationships
involving offenders, victims, family members, and the neighborhoods from which they are
spawned. More specifically, restorative justice emphasizes the recovery of the victim through
the processes of redress, vindication, and healing, on the one hand, and of the offender
through the processes of fair treatment, reformation, and recompense to the victim, on the
other.

Social Justice and Social Inequalities Research Paper

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Abstract
Social justice is a philosophical and trans-disciplinary concept that has no particular or distinct disciplinary
home. Social justice in theory and practice is part of the general evolution of justice in human civilizations,
which is a part of the ongoing struggles against the repression of any people and on behalf of the liberation of
all people. The applications of social justice are best understood in relation to the applications of equal justice
and restorative justice.

Introduction
Social justice is a philosophical and transdisciplinary concept that has no particular or distinct disciplinary
home. Within and without the domains of criminology, both the struggle for and the study of social justice are
underdeveloped and/or unfinished projects. Presently, the constitution of social justice and how to secure
human rights for all are not firmly established or agreed upon by most people. Nevertheless, a listing of the
basic liberties of social justice includes freedom of ideas, thoughts, and speech; freedom of association;
freedom of ethnic and religious culture; freedom from slavery; freedom from racism, sexism, and
discrimination; the right to equality and human needs for all; and the redistribution of power, wealth, and status
for all, and for entire societies (Sadeghi and Price, 2007).

Over the short term, the struggle for social justice has reflected the historical changes and continuities that
helped to form the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the General Assembly of the
United Nations in 1948. Drawing on the battle cry of the French Revolution, ‘dignity, liberty, equality, and
brotherhood’; on the demands of the Industrial Revolution for political, social, and economic equity; and,
finally, on the communal and national solidarity movements associated with the postcolonial era, the articles of
the UDHR brought together in one document the universal meanings of human rights.
This struggle for universal human rights within the evolution of justice has not followed anything resembling a
linear pathway forward in time and space. Not only has every generation of rights met with resistance, but also
major strides on the course to human rights efficacy have also experienced some kind of backlash or setback.
To be sure, reactionary forces have not typically nullified each progressive chapter in the acquisition of human
rights. In fact, the collective evidence is otherwise: “History preserves the human rights record as each
generation builds on the hopes and achievements of its predecessors while struggling to free itself from
authoritarianism and improve its social conditions” for the future (Ishay, 2004: p. 4).

Background
Social justice may be thought of simply as “the common good through the equalization of goods or services”
(Sadeghi and Price, 2007: p. 4), or it may be more elaborately defined as “the fair distribution of opportunities,
rewards and responsibilities in society, as well as principles and institutions for the distribution of meaningful
social goods – income, shelter, food, health, education, the freedom to pursue individual goals” (Hudson, 2013:
p. 432).

An Italian Catholic priest, Luigi Taparelli, coined the term ‘social justice.’ In his book, Theoretical Treatise on
Natural Law (published between 1840 and 1843), and based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, he claimed
that the components of social justice were products of “natural theology, in which morality, based on religion,
ought to be sought after by all people, who, under God, must adhere to their moral beliefs in doing what is
right” (Sadeghi and Price, 2007: p. 699). In 1948, the late Father William J. Ferree (1997) in his “The Act of
Social Justice” had characterized social justice as the duty in which each person in society is morally obligated
to care for the common good of all.

Probably the most influential theory of social justice has been John Rawls’ notion of “justice as fairness” in his
A Theory of Justice (1972), which draws upon both the basic social contract theory and the Kantian
philosophical tradition of justice as impartiality. Like most theorists on social justice, Rawls focused his
concerns on answering two fundamental questions. “First, how the rules for a fair distribution of meaningful
social goods can be determined; second, how much or how little inequality is permissible in a socially just
society” (Hudson, 2013: p. 432). In response to the first question, Rawls answers that the rules and institutions
of a just society can be obtained only by people acting in an unnatural position of ignorance of their own
position, or behind a “veil of ignorance.” Accordingly, he is suggesting that a fair distribution can only come
about by establishing rules or procedures designed for the purposes of securing impartiality as much as
possible. With respect to the question of inequality versus equality or to Rawls’s “principle of difference,”
which maintains that social and economic inequalities are just to the extent that they benefit everyone.

In answering these questions, Rawls sought to strike a balance between equality and freedom. Alternative
theories usually prioritize one or the other. For example, Marxist theories line up behind equality; libertarian
and neoliberal theories line up behind freedom. A variant of welfare liberalism articulated by Michael Walzer
in Spheres of Justice (1983) defends pluralism and equality, wherein he argues that diverse goods and services
should have different degrees of social distribution on the basis of individual need.

On The ‘Evolution Of Justice’: Equal, Restorative, And Social

Justice is an evolving phenomenon in its ideation, ideology, and implementation. As social constructions and
ideal systems, justice discourses and practices cannot be separated from the modern evolution of law, justice,
and society – or of what can be described as a three-tier revolution in just-ology or in the entitlement of all
human beings to share the exact same formal rights as everybody else regardless of their class, race or
ethnicity, gender, religious, national, or sexual affiliation (Ishay, 2004). When each of these models or systems
of justice first emerged, they represented a particular stage in the struggle to expand individual rights in
relation to both the collective rights of societies and the rights of the nation-states. Ultimately, these rights
were extended to all peoples as universal human rights.
The first generation of rights represented the struggle for ‘equal justice’ or the struggle for ‘negative rights.’
These called for a restraint from uninhibited state or monarchial power over the individual. This generation of
rights was derived from the American and French Revolutions, which both struggled to gain freedom from
arbitrary rule. Collectively, these rights, articulated more recently in the Civil and Political Rights of the
International Bill of Rights (1966), have shaped governmental control by “rule of law” rather than “rule of
man.” In the domains of crime and crime control, these rights have at least formally established an impartial
and fair enforcement of the procedural and substantive components of the criminal and civil laws.

The second generation of rights represented the struggle for ‘restorative justice’ or the struggle for ‘positive
rights.’ These called for ‘affirmative’ actions by and/or on behalf of the state for pursuing the common welfare.
Rooted in the struggles to democratize governments and to make them responsible to the needs of people
living in ‘post’ laissez-faire monopoly societies as a whole, these rights have shaped the sociopolitical
obligations or minimal duties of the state to facilitate the self-actualization of individual human beings (Barak,
1980). These rights were also collectively articulated in 1966, in the Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of
the International Bill of Rights. In the domains of crime and crime prevention, these have included an
emphasis on community social welfare, penitence and redemption, and offender–victim reconciliation.

The third generation of rights is represented by the contemporary worldwide struggle for ‘social justice,’ or the
struggle for universal human rights. Evolving out of the emerging conditions of global interdependence, these
rights call for international rules of interaction, such as the establishment of the International Criminal Court in
The Hague in 1999. These universal rights also recognize that the delivery of negative and positive rights for
all cannot be satisfied within the body of individual states acting alone. In the universal struggle for social
justice, world peace, and victim reduction, global emphases have been on ending world hunger, forgiving debt
to underdeveloped nations, and treating victims of AIDS/HIV and other debilitating and/or life-threatening
diseases, famines, tsunamis, and so forth worldwide.

Equal Justice
In most developed nations like the United States, equal justice assumes the rationality of the prevailing
political, economic, and social arrangements in general and of the administration of criminal justice in
particular. Within those systems of justice, where criminals are viewed as ‘bad’ and ‘mad,’ they are typically
disconnected from their social conditions and from their class, racial or ethnic, gendered, and sexual relations.
Whether defendants are from at-risk social environments or from privileged milieus, these facts are not
formally relevant to the accused or convicted offenders as all are subject to the same ‘equal justice’ or due
process of the law.

Ignoring the effects of social structures and ecologies of crime, these models of equal justice have traditionally
not considered the interests of either the injured parties or their perpetrators or the communities from which
they originate. Furthermore, the policies of equal justice do not take into account the concept of equal
sanctions for unequal offenders or victims. Similarly, the unequal treatment of analogous social injuries or
harms perpetrated by the powerful and the powerless, respectively, serve to reproduce the status quo of crime,
victimization, and discriminatory justice for many.

The contemporary model of equal justice practices in the United States has its roots in the mid-eighteenth
century, when the European Age of Reason or Enlightenment was busy reforming the excessively arbitrary and
barbaric justice practices from the medieval period. Although not driven by revenge or vengeance, these
utilitarian and practical applications of equalformal (retributive) justice are repressive as these help to
perpetuate a class of marginally ‘dangerous’ offenders. At the same time, these policies of equal criminal
justice downplay the value for most rule violators of flexible sentencing and community alternatives to
imprisonment.
Restorative Justice
Fundamentally, restorative justice systems are about decentering punishment in regulatory institutions. At the
same time, restorative justice acknowledges the place that punishment has as a means of communicating the
‘shamefulness’ of the acts in question (Braithwaite et al., 2006). Restorative policies and practices of justice
assume that most offenders and nonoffenders, whether perpetrators, victims, or both, fundamentally share an
intrinsic humanity (Zehr and Mika, 1998).

Modern practices of restorative justice have their legal roots in the ancient patterns of such diverse cultures as
the Sumerian Code of UrNammu (2050 BC), the Hebrew Scriptures and the Code of Hammurabi (1700 BC),
the Roman Law of the Twelve Tribes (449 BC), and the earliest collection of the Germanic tribal laws, the Lex
Salica (AD 496). Each of these legal systems required that offenders and their families settle accounts with
victims and their families, not simply to ensure that injured persons received restitution or compensation but
also to ensure that communities were reestablished or restored to their former peace. Similarly, in many
precolonial and indigenous societies around the world, sanctions were also primarily compensatory rather than
retributive, intended primarily to make victims whole or to restore them to their previous status (Barak et al.,
2010).

Restorative justice is being pursued when the focus of justice is on the harms of wrongdoing more than the
rules that have been broken, and on the victims and offenders working toward the restoration of the former and
the support of the latter in understanding their transgressions and meeting their obligations to make things right
again; and is aimed at empowering those affected parties in the processes of justice and dialogue. For example,
contemporary systems of Japanese justice, which emphasize ‘confession, repentance, and absolution,’ are
about compensating their victims and restoring community peace (Van Ness and Heetderks-Strong, 1997).

Today, the idea of restorative justice has come to have many different meanings and practices. It has come to
be associated with innovations in community mediation, problem-solving justice, victim–offender
reconciliation, alternative sentencing, and community service (Daly and Immarigeon, 1998). Regardless of the
myriad of practices that seem to be part of a larger movement to incorporate restorative justice programs into
communities, they all share in common the desire to move beyond the illegality of the crime to the more
fundamental needs of human dignity and respect as well as to the mediated sources of conflict and dispute
resolution.

Unlike equal justice systems that revolve around how much pain and suffering have been inflicted by the
actions of the wrongdoer, restorative justice systems revolve around how much harm has been repaired or will
be prevented (‘less harm’). Restorative justice systems are preoccupied with both the interpersonal and larger
structural-mutualistic relationships involving offenders, victims, family members, and the neighborhoods from
which they are spawned. More specifically, restorative justice emphasizes the recovery of the victim through
the processes of redress, vindication, and healing, on the one hand, and of the offender through the processes
of fair treatment, reformation, and recompense to the victim, on the other.

Finally, restorative justice relies on both the formal and informal mechanism of social control as it supports the
role of government as being responsible for preserving law and order and the role of the community as being
responsible for preserving peace and justice. Most importantly, for example, restorative justice involving
victim–offender encounters or reconciliation programs tends to humanize both offenders and victims to the
other and “permits them substantial creativity in constructing a response that deals not only with the injustice
that occurred but with the futures of both parties as well” (Van Ness and Heetderks-Strong, 1997: p. 89).
Social Justice
While equal justice systems revolve primarily around retribution between the offender and the state, and
restorative justice systems revolve primarily around reparation and healing between the offender and the
victim, social justice systems venture beyond immediate conflicts – perpetrators, victims, and communities – to
an account of larger political, economic, and social arrangements. Social justice models incorporate, for
example, patterns of social inequality or disadvantage as well as patterns of privilege, power, and advantage,
which make people and their communities susceptible or not to the experiences of criminal harm and to the
processes of criminalization.

The visions of equity and fairness associated with the policies of social justice are broader and more ambitious
than those visions associated with the models of equal and restorative justice. Social justice models expand the
notions of conflict and injury beyond what the sovereign law recognizes to include those harms identified as
part of an evolving set of human rights, some established in treaties and covenants, and some in international
resolutions or tribunals. The violations of any of these fundamental rights constitute what are known in the
world community as ‘crimes against humanity.’

These offenses generally are committed by policies or practices or by the authorities or agents of the state, such
as in the violation of a person and/or a group’s inalienable rights to be free, for example, from exploitation,
slavery, impoverishment, hatred, discrimination, or genocide. In this context, social justice recognizes harms,
injuries, offenses, wrongs, crimes, and violations that are not merely expressions of interpersonal conflict but
also expressions of the organizational, institutional, and structural relations of the prevailing political,
economic, and social arrangements. Accordingly, to address the underpinning structural inequities or injustices
in those arrangements, social justice stresses the importance of public policies of ‘harm reduction’ that go
beyond the confines of the criminal justice system.

Therefore, attention is paid not only to the obvious crimes of the powerful, such as those committed in
corporate America or on Wall Street, but also more generally to the economic harm and social victimization
caused by all types of deregulation, from environmental to financial; to the lack of social and human capital
formation; and to the oppression and exploitation of a growing multiethnic underclass in the United States and
many other nations. To the extent that these social forces create crime and crime control systems, in the forms
of equal or restorative justice, which are repressive in the sense that they secure a legal order that reinforces
inequality and privilege, social justice models advocate a ‘war’ or intervention against those forces.

In the evolution of justice, what distinguishes social justice from equal justice and restorative justice is that
only the former model of justice struggles to escape the confines or shackles of bourgeois legality. The
problems with capitalist Constitutions like the United States’ are the many claims that equal rights and
responsibilities have been substituted for the harsh realities of class domination. In other words, by way of the
Constitution, the struggle over the legitimacy of social acts is removed from the plane of morality and society.
In turn, these social actions or relationships are relocated in the plane of law and politics. Justice is no longer
what is fair but what is legal and politically expedient as decided mostly by lawyers and judges playing by the
capitalist rules of the game (Ollman, 1987).

Ultimately, to overcome class domination and/or to achieve social justice, the political economies and societies
of the world will have to transition from capitalist formations to socialist formations. Otherwise, social justice
for all will remain an unrealized ‘pipe dream’ trapped in the realities or contradictions of capitalist inequalities.
In the meantime, piecemeal or halfhearted reforms in the name of social justice are resumed and advanced.

For example, some proponents of social justice advocate on behalf of ‘visionary gradualism’ or ‘free-market
socialism’ (Harrington, 1989). Other social justice proponents talk in terms of democratizing and humanizing
capitalism (Shiller, 2011). Grounded in the global principles of feminist, antiracial, and ecological justice,
these views still ascribe to the political economies of capitalism. At the same time, these ‘social justicians’
believe in the eradication of social subjugation, oppression, and exploitation as well as in the establishment of
fundamental human rights for all. They oppose unenlightened self-interest, unregulated markets, and unfettered
victimization (Barak, 2012).

The Limitations Of Equal Justice And The Struggle For Sovereign Justice
As Anatole France wrote about the inefficacy of equal justice in his best-selling The Red Lily in 1894, “The
law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread” (quoted in Sadeghi and Price, 2007: p. 699). Then and now, such laws as those are naturally only
relevant to the marginal, to the destitute, to the homeless, to the mentally ill, and so on. Hence, when legal
evaluations or assessments of justice – criminal or civil – ignore differences of class, ethnicity, gender, or
sexuality in particular and socioeconomic statuses in general, or when they falsely treat unequal persons or
corporations under the law as one and the same, they ‘blindly’ reinforce these differences or inequalities.

Similarly, because of an ideological preference for bourgeois legality with its overemphasis on notions of
individual-equal justice, most critiques of the administration of justice fall short. Instead of focusing on the
substantive inadequacies of the criminalizing and penalizing processes and the selective and differential
outcomes that systemically hurt the powerless and benefit the powerful, most critiques focus on procedural
irregularities or on applications of due process and equal protection under the law. The point is that there is a
long list of harms and injuries that have been and/or could be prohibited by law that victimize millions of
people daily, yet are commonly treated by the legal order as if these actions or omissions were or are ‘beyond
incrimination’ (Barak, 1991a, 1991b, 2012).

Moreover, the consequences of these selective enforcements, differential applications, and inauspicious
omissions are counterproductive not only for alleviating pain or reducing harm, but also for obtaining social
justice for the most marginalized members of society. For example, the unsuccessful policies of the ‘war on
drugs,’ mandatory sentencing, and the widening of the nets of crime control on less serious offenders have
adversely affected African American families and, to a lesser extent, Latino American families. In the case of
the former, the large-scale removal of young black males from their communities has contributed to the
depletion of the supply of potential marriage partners for young black females and to the accumulation of
generational impoverishment. Some criminologists have argued that these social relations of crime,
victimization, and punishment have encouraged young female-headed households, creating precisely the types
of family formations that have been linked with higher rates of street crime and domestic abuse when not given
adequate social support (Currie, 2005; Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994; Foster and Hagan, 2009).

In turn, these counter-effective policies coupled with assembly line, plea-bargained, and bureaucratized equal
justice for the marginal classes help to reinforce stereotypic images of criminals. These exclude high-powered
corporate executives, emphasizing low-life predators who murder, rob, assault, kidnap, and do drugs rather
than white-collar looters who inside trade, contract without bidding, or commit high-stakes securities fraud. To
be clear, the point of this critique is not to argue against equal justice in the administration of laws. It is to
argue against equal justice as the endpoint of justice rather than as a means to complementing other systems of
justice. Indeed, all agents or workers of the various equal justice systems should aspire to act impartially or
neutrally, according to both the letter and the spirit of due process and equal protection under the law.
However, to achieve social justice, legal-equal justice represents the most elementary of steps.

In addition, equal justice needs to be assisted by the goals and objectives of restorative and social justice if the
mass victimization of peoples around the world is to decline. These latter models of justice offer substantial
ways to improve the quality of justice beyond the existing legal processes, helping to better curb and reduce all
forms of harm and injury – personal, organizational, institutional, and structural – than equal justice systems
do.
The Limitations Of International Law And The Struggle For Global Justice
The contradictions in the spirit and the enforcement of international law inhibit a reduction in both the
worldwide victimization of people and the reproduction of crime and violence. This is because international
law does not facilitate the ability of the global community to satisfy the basic human needs and rights of all
people. At its core:

——International law is a limitation on autonomy, yet one that has its maximal force when other states are
willing to act in its name. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown that when states elect to act ‘in
the name’ of international law. they often do so (or refuse to do so) out of their own political and economic
interests rather than within the interests of an international social order. (Mullin and Rothe, 2008: p. 26)

The radical vision of social justice shared below stems from a humanistic, democratic, and participatory world
order based on ‘mixed’ economies of public and private ownership, where people cooperate in both the work
and leisure of their local and global communities. It is not that societies will have removed their economic and
other forms of competition. Rather, these reciprocal interactions of capital and labor will work on the premises
of ‘fair’ rather than ‘free’ exchanges of goods and services. These social relations are also underpinned by
sustainable and balanced ecosystems. A global order of this kind strives for ecological harmony in the context
of climate change and in the ways in which societies and technologies interact with their natural environments
to protect all forms of life and habitat (Barak, 2009).

Human Needs
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we live in a world of shrinking resources but not in a world of
scarcity of goods and services. Thus, in a world organized around ecological sustainability, a primary goal of
global production of international economic activity should be for the provision of the necessities of life for all
of earth’s inhabitants. These basics should include but not be limited to food, shelter, healthcare, childcare,
education, social services, culture, art, leisure, recreation, work, peace, and security. In brief, this is social
production for use and profit by all so that whole groups of people do not have to needlessly suffer.

Human Rights
The objective here is to maximize and extend civil and human rights for all people, which means also curbing
abuses and discriminatory actions based on or stemming from differences due to age, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, religious affiliation, disability, or migratory status. For example, with regard to sexual orientation,
the end of all anti-gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender restrictions in the law; or, concerning age, there are
special rights that may be attached to children and seniors; regarding women, the reduction and elimination of
all forms of sexism, especially that which revolves around sexual harassment, violence, and exploitation; and
finally, concerning migratory workers, a global world order that would recognize the rights of people to freely
move across borders to live, visit, and work as they choose.

Human Justness
Perhaps the toughest struggles for social justice have to do with obtaining human justness in everyday or
ordinary public-private contracts, and for exceptional or extraordinary atrocities. In the case of the former, do
the ways in which contracts or ‘right-towork’ laws are written adversely affect workers in general, and current
or former inmates in relation to the penal-industrial complex in particular? In the case of the latter, there are
the largely inadequate or unresponsive actions to acts of genocidal rape or to other crimes against humanity,
such as torture. With domestic and international laws in place to challenge these various forms of harms and
social injuries, there is hope that such behavior might be reduced, if not deferred, altogether. Without either
 changing the fundamental international motivations and opportunities of a global economy and/or establishing
the necessary constraints and customary controls to curb these types of antisocial behavior, however,
governments and their proxies in specific situations are under little or no pressure to refrain from their
continued abuse.

Future Prospects
Dialectically, within an ‘evolving’ system of social justice and a developing system of capitalism worldwide,
there are presently more middle classes emerging than there are middle classes disappearing. At the same time,
as the wealth gap expands and inequality accelerates, the competition for uneven wage differences intensifies
at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the hegemonic neoliberal policies – austerity, privatization, and deregulation
– that are directing both domestic and international development all work against the materialization of
redistributing the wealth for all human beings. In addition to expanding or widening the universality of
humanitarian law and practice, the struggle for social justice has to consolidate its effort, nationally and
supranationally, to resist those harmful policies of hierarchy and privilege. The struggle for social justice
should also devise alternative strategies for democratizing and humanizing the vagaries of capitalism.

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Conclusion