Theories of Justice

Abstract

As we have seen, the ideas of justice and injustice have a long history within legal theory. More particularly, having dealt with Aristotle’s theory of justice and having seen the importance of the idea of unjust laws to the Thomist theory of natural law (in Chapter 3), and having seen how the revival of interest in natural law theory during the latter part of the 20th century emphasizes its evaluative, rather than constitutive, function, we now return to the same theme. More particularly, this chapter will consider utilitarianism, the economic analysis of law, Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism and Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia.