Reasoning From Injustice

Authors

Robert L. Tsai, Boston University School of Law

Abstract

In a series of lectures at Yale Law School, the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar critiqued leading models of justice as overly abstract and lacking a realistic account of the social dynamics that perpetuate injustice. In this essay, Professor Tsai builds on Shklar’s account of injustice as a social phenomenon by offering a structural reading of key literary texts that explore the nature of legal injustice—from the Book of Job to Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave. A close reading of these texts permits us to flesh out Shklar’s observations and “give injustice its due.”

Tsai argues that three civic faculties must be developed to improve democratic citizens’ capacity to reason from injustice. First, citizens must acquire the capacity to recognize how communal narratives and social ties are manipulated to obstruct a sense of injustice from developing. Iniquity festers when citizens are incapable of drawing the connections between the material deprivations they experience and the laws or policies they cannot readily observe. Second, we need a refined understanding of the various stages of democratic outrage, which entails more than the inculcation of empathy. Beyond learning how principles are supposed to work in ideal conditions, citizens in an aging pluralistic order must acquire a sophisticated understanding of how law, morality, and the economy interact to block humanitarian projects and dissipate justified outrage. Third, a culture of indifference that has metastasized makes reform even more challenging. As citizens become increasingly aware that the very institutions created to promote justice often perpetuate injustice, they will have to confront their reluctance to work with tainted bodies of knowledge. But this ability to use, adapt, and occasionally subvert civic knowledge is crucial to overcoming democratic heartbreak and developing inspiring and effective models for political action.

Recommended Citation

Robert L. Tsai, Reasoning From Injustice, 30 Mich. J. Race & L. 261 (2026).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol30/iss2/4