The question – why love matters to justice? – has very concrete applications: as a means to understand the psychology of empathy; as a means by which public institutions might foster and encourage empathy as an important value in democratic cultures. My way of understanding the question starts in a different place, namely, intimate loving relationships, and asks, more dynamically, why such relationships can and do lead to justice, and how. I here review my overall argument, and then reflect on the two issues that are, I believe, implicit in the relationships I have studied: The moral injury inflicted by patriarchy, and the role love across the boundaries can and does sometimes play in healing the injury and giving voice to the injustice of patriarchy.

As we have seen, again and again, what holds in place some of the worst structural injustices of our world (anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia) are the Love Laws – the series of written and unwritten rules that enforce patriarchy, and as a result, tell each of us who we may love, and how, and how much, all in order to maintain control over the choices central to intimate life. Because the Love Laws play this role, resistance to them can play a pivotal role in resistance to injustice, as I hopefully have shown.

The argument began (Chapter 1) with setting out the framework of my analysis, and showing its explanatory value in understanding when breaking the adultery laws, the high crime and misdemeanor of patriarchy, has led to resistance, as Nathaniel Hawthorne suggested it might in his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter. I then turned to two adulterous couples – Henry Lewes and George Eliot, and Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill – and showed why and how falling in love led both Eliot and Mill not only to break but to question the Victorian Love Laws, empowering George Eliot's remarkable resisting voice showing how patriarchy destroys love, and the collaborative works resisting patriarchy of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill on both the subjection of women and the liberal values of free speech and personal autonomy in intimate life, both of which patriarchy represses.