The Study of Justice

Reflections on 30+ Years

Gray Cavender, Pat Lauderdale

Introduction: The Study of Justice

We published The Study of Justice (TSJ) in 1986. The article became kind of a North star for our own department specializing in Justice Studies at an institution in the southwestern U.S., and we hope for departments in other universities as well. We want to reflect on the article, its context, our intent, and on its continuing utility. As is often the case, our article was embedded in a larger intellectual context.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the explosion of university criminal justice degree programs loosened criminology from its traditional interdisciplinary moorings, that is, from connections to disciplines like sociology and psychology. As these programs flourished and increasingly offered graduate degrees, including the PhD, criminal justice was becoming its own insular discipline (Osgood, 1998; Jurik and Cavender, 2004).

Along with this emerging insularity came a growing concern that any deep, systematic understanding of crime and criminal justice required an awareness of broader social issues, including insights that could best be gained from interdisciplinarity. Indeed, criminology seemed to be abandoning its interest in understanding the structural causes of crime in favor of utilitarian deterrence-minded approaches that advocated increasingly punitive crime policies (Cavender, 1984). These trends and concerns led the faculty in our criminal justice department at Arizona State University (ASU) to expand our mission, and, after considerable discussion, to change our name and adopt a broader focus and an enhanced interdisciplinary emphasis.

In 1982, we became The Center for the Study of Justice, and a few years later, The School of Justice Studies. Many of the faculty continued to study various aspects of criminal justice, but increasingly we expanded our focus to include other justice-related inquiries, ranging from national and global water and sustainability issues to Indigenous justice issues and many other relevant topics. Gradually with new hires, our faculty came to represent a variety of disciplines, e.g., sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, education, law, criminology, history, and the humanities. Drawing from this context, this chapter reflects on over three decades of our work—from developing a comprehensive justice studies program toward interdisciplinary evolution, and ultimately what programs like this mean in the academy and what they could mean in many other places.

The place of justice

We first introduce ourselves. Gray Cavender is a professor emeritus and a former director of the university-wide Ph.D./J.D. program in Justice Studies. His teaching and research interests include media studies, punishment, and law and society. He grew up in a small Tennessee town. He is a first-generation university graduate for whom earning a college degree provided options that would have been otherwise unavailable. By educational background and perhaps by inclination, he is comfortable with and prefers interdisciplinary research. Similarly, he prefers policy strategies that are grounded in progressive ideologies. Although he enjoyed a career as a university professor and is a believer in the importance of a university-level education, he understands that universities often reinforce existing power arrangements, and that this hopefully can be confronted and changed. This background explains his interest in an approach that privileges an analytic framework of justice in university curricula and in addressing social policy.

Pat Lauderdale is a professor emeritus and former director of the university-wide Ph.D./J.D program in Justice Studies. From Comanche county, Oklahoma, he is a member of the Quanah Parker Society. His teaching and research interests include comparative law, Indigenous jurisprudence, racialization, diversity, global Indigenous struggles, and international terrorism. In 1980, he helped create the Herbert Blumer Institute in Costa Rica, which maintains the goal of discovering and describing Indigenous alternatives to violence and criminal law. He has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. His book, Law and Society (with James Inverarity and Barry Feld) has been translated into Japanese and related research has been published in Spanish, German, and Italian. Before coming to ASU, Lauderdale was an associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was invited to be a Fulbright Senior Specialist for a research project on “Indigenous peoples, minorities, and globalization,” Department of Sociology and UNISA Press, University of South Africa.

We created “a doctoral degree program in 1986, expanding our degree offerings. The Ph.D. was a university-wide, interdisciplinary program in Law and the Social Sciences. Alongside the doctorate, we added a concurrent Juris Doctorate (J.D.) option for students who wanted to combine doctoral and legal studies. With its law and social science emphasis, our curriculum embodied a clear focus on justice. Indeed, the required doctoral theory course was called Theoretical Perspectives on Justice. Initially, the course drew upon classic texts on justice and philosophy, social science work about the importance of the social and political context, and scholarship with a social policy focus that addressed what a just society might look like. Our intent was to create a rigorous degree program, one that would prepare our graduates for academic or policy-relevant professional careers. At the same time, we were adamant that scholarship should include notions of praxis, that is, we wanted to encourage scholar/activists. This position includes doctoral students who fold activist elements into their dissertation research or those graduates who pursue academic careers, but who also engage society as public intellectuals.

We moved beyond local and national perspectives to include the insights of Andre Gunder Frank and Maria Mies. Frank’s (1980) global (aka world systems) analysis of poor versus rich countries delineated the concept of levels of injustice, and Mies’ (1986) analysis of patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale explicated the exploitation of women in the international division of labor. Our new doctoral degree program was informed by feminist political theorist and policy scholar Iris Marion Young whose work on justice and the politics of difference was integral to our formative thinking (see Young, 1981). Young presented an elaborated view of justice: Justice entails establishing institutional arrangements which allow people to develop and exercise their own capabilities and to participate in determining their actions (1990). However, aligned against just social arrangements were the structural injustices of domination and oppression, which prevented people and groups from self-determination and the fulfillment of human capacities (Young, 1990). Anthropologists Laura Nader (1980) and Sally Engle Merry (1990) drew our attention to issues such as who controls legal institutions and access to them, as well as to the inequality of legal representation. We thought that a law and social sciences doctoral degree was compatible with our justice focus because as we noted in TSJ, “the ultimate aim of law is justice” (Jenkins, 1981: 334).

Our realization of the interrelationship of law and justice was not limited to graduate students. Many Justice Studies undergraduates wanted to pursue legal careers and we envisioned our curriculum as both preparing them for law school, but also for raising an awareness that lawyers, in whatever type practice they engaged, might be “provocateurs for justice” (see Aitken, 2001). We wanted these students who graduated from our program to carry with them an understanding of justice and injustice and a commitment to engage in actions in their personal and professional lives to improve social conditions.

In 2009, Justice Studies merged into ASU’s School of Social Transformation (SST), joining with other degree/certificate programs including Women and Gender Studies, African and African American Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. While maintaining the focus on justice, this new school directed its attention to intersecting dimensions of gender, ethnicity and race, disability, socioeconomic class and their relationship to justice and injustice (Horejes, 2012). Today, SST is also home to degrees in American Studies, Social and Cultural Pedagogy and offers certificates in Economic Justice, Socio-Legal Studies, Human Rights, Disability Studies, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender Studies, and American Indian Education. Faculty within Justice Studies also developed a certificate program in American Indian Justice, which later spun-off into a separate interdisciplinary degree program: American Indian Studies.

With this background as the contextual framework, our argument in the Study of Justice was that although the study of justice had long been the province of philosophy, jurisprudence and theology, it need not be. In fact, our critical analyses suggested it should not be. There is compelling intellectual value in examining justice in various historical, social, political and economic contexts, and a social science approach provides a heuristic framework for this work. Indeed, we argued against the traditional tendency of seeing the concept of justice as an abstraction, detached from social reality, and instead advocated the examination of justice within its societal context. We wrote, “Justice is conceptualized within material conditions and social relations that are historically specific. From our perspective, justice as a philosophic concept is informed by social science theory and methods” (Lauderdale and Cavender, 1986: 88-89).

We maintained that an understanding of the social and political context of justice provides a new vitality in studying matters ranging from legal developments to policy reforms. By way of an explication, we noted, for example, that civil rights legislation enacted after the Civil War remained bounded by the same socio-economic structures so it was little more than a façade for maintaining the status quo (Lauderdale and Cavender, 1986: 89; also see Inverarity, Lauderdale, and Feld, 1983). Similarly, the sanctioning “reforms” of the 1970-1980s were embedded in an increasingly conservative political context and, despite an appeal to philosophic notions of justice, ushered-in the beginnings of the mass incarceration movement that still haunts us today (Lauderdale and Cavender, 1986: 90; also see Cavender, 1984; Clear and Frost, 2014). We extend our argument beyond these specific changes and suggest that crises, legal and otherwise, are crucial because they often expose the processes by which injustice is more clearly revealed (Chew and Lauderdale, 2010).

The approach we suggested had an impact, albeit gradually. Numerous programs now have some variant of Justice Studies in their title, e.g., Justice Studies, Criminal Justice Studies, Criminology and Justice, Crime, Law and Justice, or Social Justice. Indeed, there are more than 50 programs in the U.S. and beyond that offer degrees under these banners, and there are more than 250 programs if we consider Peace and Justice degrees. Although their curricula vary, a focus on justice is a consistent theme across these programs; moreover, a significant number of these programs were created by our Justice Studies doctoral students. In other cases, faculty served as consultants to universities seeking to modify existing programs by adding a critical analysis of justice component to their curricula.

Why study justice?

Over the years, other indicators have emerged to further demonstrate the salience of studying justice. For example, the Justice Studies Association was founded in 1998 by practitioners, activists and scholars from a variety of disciplines. The organization’s focus is on criminal, social, transformative and restorative justice. They publish an academic journal, Contemporary Justice Review. More recently, another organization has appeared: Scholars for Social Justice. This organization features a political agenda that advocates justice for all, especially society’s most vulnerable. They produce blogs, videos, newspaper Op Ed pieces, and teaching materials. ASU graduates and SST faculty are active in both organizations.

Since our original article was published in 1986, important currents in academic thought have appeared and matured that further draw out the arguments for an encompassing justice approach that is both comparative and longitudinal. Critical race theory, feminist studies, and multicultural approaches all build on a framework that is decidedly justice-oriented and that is cognizant of the larger social conditions in which notions of justice reside (Jurik and Cavender, 2004). This framework is especially manifest in intersectional approaches that critically emphasize hegemonic notions of race, ethnicity, gender, social class, disability, sexuality, and critical global studies (Horejes, 2012).

While some of these currents of academic thought speak to new theories and methodologies, others address earlier pathways of knowledge, including Indigenous knowledges (Kovach, 2009). For example, scholars today could learn much from earlier indigenous populations that struggled to put equality over efficiency and from organizations such as the Iroquois Confederation whose leaders aimed to produce social justice (Lauderdale, 1997). Similarly, Indigenous populations have long-known how to manage land and other community resources. That knowledge has been disregarded and intentionally silenced is due, among other factors, to land expropriation and colonial usurpation/land grabbing, but is also an aspect of the ecological crises that now threaten the planet. Research projects into repatriating Indigenous lands and restoring Indigenous collective land tenure are important justice and survival issues. Indigenous self-determination and community governance have been shown to protect, nurture and even enhance biodiversity and agrobiodiversity, matters that address climate change, food injustice, forced migration, and other global challenges (Lauderdale and Oliverio, 2011; Treuer, 2019).

Even with the success of our program and those that have followed elsewhere, it is more compelling than ever that we analyze a host of critical issues through the lens of justice of the sort that we advocated in TSJ. Indeed, our world shouts for this necessity, and our arguments and others that have followed attest to the urgency of studying these issues, especially our graduates working in research one universities or the equivalent in private industry.

Crises, again, are one inroad to understanding injustices and paths to remedy them. The murder of black men and women by police in circumstances that seem indefensible has produced Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, a movement that is expressly grounded in the language of justice. The violent police crackdown on BLM protestors generates a similar justice-related condemnation. Similarly, recent backlash movements have arisen that would prohibit classroom discussions of racist and violent attacks on our citizens such as the 1921 massacre of African American citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Such government-sanctioned attacks and the efforts at repressing discussions of them seek to marginalize entire populations, and, in so doing, undermine the development of more just social arrangements (Young, 1990: 53-58; Rodriguez and Lauderdale, 2014; also see Ransby, 2018).

But, the university itself should become a topic of analysis. For a number of years, universities have become increasingly corporatized whether in terms of “branding” their programs or a constant focus on the acquisition of revenue. There are reasons for this. There has been a continuing diminution in funding from state legislatures, which means that for universities to survive, they must turn to other sources of funding, for example, partnerships with the private sector. These relationships, even though understandable given the fiscal crisis that threatens universities, nonetheless are likely to compromise any critical stance about the role of business in perpetuating unjust social arrangements. Or, universities may be changing because they are a part of the neoliberal shift in today’s society. This context affects universities much like it affects other social institutions.

The good news is that scholars have noted these changes and are analyzing them and their impact on the university, its operations and its mission. Scholars take different tacks in their analyses. Some of them (Slaughter and Leslie, 1999) focus on the corporatization of the university, why it is happening and what it means to the operation and mission of the institution. Others (Paperson, 2017) address what it means to decolonize the university in a manner that, among other goals, equips students with the skills necessary to attempt the decolonization of the university.

Our analytic framework of justice fits well with these critiques of the university. Students learn to focus a critical lens on the university in the same manner they would focus on the economy or on other institutions that reinforce problematic social arrangements. With such an awareness, former students may be able to demand change when asked for donations to their alma mater. Similarly for graduate students who enter the professoriate, an awareness that the university is not just their employer but an institution that reinforces social inequities, can encourage a critical stance that demands actions, alone or in concert with colleagues.

Pressing justice concerns

As with other historical global tragedies, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, once again, the racialized and class-based inequities and injustices inherent in our health system. Moreover, as the pandemic has moved into rural America, the closures of rural hospitals because they do not generate enough profit has endangered people who live outside of our urban areas. There may be no more fundamental justice-related issue than the health of our citizens (see Daniels, Kennedy, and Kawachi, 1999).

The recent pandemic also disrupted food supply chains generally and brought to the fore food insecurity issues for economically marginalized and other vulnerable populations, whether in the urban core or on American Indian reservations. It is a fundamental condition of justice that people must have access to food (see, Mihesuah and Hoover, 2019).

Educational access, whether through computers for online learning amid Covid-19 or admissions to elite universities bought by bribes from wealthy parents, e.g., the Varsity Blues Scandal, challenge assumptions about the educational system and the “merit claims” that have perpetuated inequities in the U.S. (see Sandel, 2020). Economically impoverished parents cannot afford to hire private tutors and lack expensive internet services needed for children in school. If students are denied access to an education or if that access is differentially and unequally distributed, social arrangements for justice cannot be met (see Horejes, 2012; Prior and de Heer, 2022.

Further, gender-based inequalities have been exposed among caregivers. For example, women are bearing the brunt of increased housework and childcare, including home schooling during the crisis. The situation significantly endangers the progress of women individually and as a group and creates a crisis of childcare that threatens the entire society (Bateman and Ross, 2020; also see Miller, 2020). During the pandemic, we also witnessed that women of color are disproportionately represented in occupations deemed essential, and yet these low-wage jobs often lack basic protections against exposure to the virus. Our examination of this crisis reveals, once again, the inflexible working conditions that characterize low wage jobs, putting many in generally dire straits. The crisis showed itself as devastating to families that are economically impoverished, disproportionately families of color, many of whom are a step away from eviction (Desmond, 2020; also see Desmond, 2016).

During the pandemic and in subsequent discussions, demonstrations against public health business shutdowns and curfews that were aimed at slowing the spread of the virus, and claims that wearing a mask violates individual freedom bring into sharp relief notions of rights and responsibilities to the larger society. Hegel warned of “radical freedom,” a situation wherein rights become so individualistic, so abstract, and we would add, so detached from the social reality, that they actually delimit freedom in society for all (see Horowitz, 1966). These dangerous tendencies have again been displayed with an even greater level of violence (or threats of violence) in the insurrection at the U.S. Capital. Similar attacks occurred in Oregon and Michigan. An issue of justice—the rights of the individual vs. the well-being of the larger society—demands the attention of scholars and of policy makers.

Discussion: Moving forward, the next 30 years

Often, crises reveal fissures and problematic features in institutional social arrangements. Taken together, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Tyree Williams and so many others combined with the extreme situation generated by the pandemic demonstrate the necessity of rethinking what has been too often taken for granted about institutions and social arrangements in society. If unaddressed, these problems will only become worse. Moreover, future crises may echo the Covid-19 pandemic or emerge from other sources, yet issues of justice will remain critical for our global economy. We saw similar problems following 9-11 in the U.S. The large-scale rethinking of such issues must occur through a lens that focuses on issues of justice and locates them within specific social-politico-economic conditions. Peace, food, housing, health and continuing opportunities for society’s members are fundamental issues of justice.

Justice is a goal, an ideal to which people and societies aspire. All too often, it seems to be just out of reach, but we still must try to attain it. We continue to study justice historically and comparatively and remain alert to issues of ethnocentrism. Moreover, it is essential that universities and education generally continue to address social injustices, ranging from issues of systemic racism to the twin infrastructures of health and childcare. It is wise to heed the old saying that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it (Santayana, 1998).

When we wrote TSJ more than 30 years ago, we thought that we were offering an approach that was right for that time. We trust that the issues raised by a justice approach are still important, now more than ever.

References

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate the thoughtful comments of colleagues: Scott Bowman, Thomas Horejes, Nancy Jurik, Nicholas Natividad, and Annamarie Oliverio.