During the last thirty years of the twentieth century, writing on justice flourished and multiplied throughout and beyond the developed world. This intellectual movement was spearheaded by John Rawls's rightly famous A Theory of Justice, and augmented by hundreds of other writers who have debated the issues with close and acute tenacity. Their vast body of work has been admirably engaged in at least two ways. It has been deeply connected both to academic work in law and in the social sciences and to the more practical activity of many political movements. Debates about human rights and the justice of wars, about the ending of apartheid and of communism, about Third World development and welfare states, have been continuously linked to more abstract writing on the requirements of justice. The more abstract writing has been deeply argued, diverse, scrupulous and useful. There is much to admire.

And yet, I believe, there is also much more to be understood and investigated. Beyond current debates on justice there are unresolved, sometimes unasked, questions both about the philosophical and conceptual boundaries of writing on justice, and about the political and other boundaries of just institutions. The essays in this book do not present a new theory of justice: they raise questions about the boundaries assumed in work on justice and suggest alternative ways of approaching these questions.

Most protagonists in recent debates about justice have accepted John Rawls's agenda of devising a theory of justice that reaches (varying forms of) broadly ‘Kantian’ normative conclusions while remaining within ‘the canons of a reasonable empiricism’.