Academic & Crossref DOI Search

Abstract: This chapter will discuss how an understanding of justice as accountability, justice as collaboration and justice as visibility shape the author’s research practice, and how the projects they have been involved in have created these understandings of justice and the importance of creating spaces for justice conversations. These projects include the Minutes of Evidence project, a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, education experts, performance artists, community members, and government and community organizations to consider new modes of publicly engaging with historical and structural injustice; Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace, a collaboration between Indonesian and Australian academics that worked with three marginalized communities to develop alternative city tours of the city of Yogyakarta that highlight and narrate sites of historical injustice; and Access to Justice during COVID-19 for Newly Arrived, Refugee and Migrant Communities in Victoria that is collaborating with service providers and community organizations to document the experiences of the communities they work with in accessing legal and social support services during COVID-19, and understanding these within a framework of access to justice.

Abstract: The chapter introduces the justice framework that underpins analysis in later chapters of the book. The Aristotelian origin of the corrective/distributive justice dichotomy is presented. The chapter then presents the two justice paradigms in more detail, paying attention to key developments and premises that have emerged in the evolution of each. It charts key corrective justice developments from its fault-motivated origins to compensation-motivated reconceptualization. It also describes distributive justice’s origins in notions of communal merit and its slow evolution in embracing broader standards of generosity and equality. The chapter concludes by highlighting the relevance of each to the subsequent contextual analysis.

Abstract: Abstract A single mother, 25, with a one-year-old son is indicted for Medicaid fraud. The woman, herself the daughter of a single mother, has completed only three years of high school. She works as a waitress at a diner, relying on her mother and sisters to care for her child during working hours. At her trial, her lawyer, out of the presence of the jury, informs the judge that his client is prepared to concede the accuracy of the charges against her but that she wishes to interpose a defense of justification. The defendant will testify, her lawyer states, that her son suffers from a heart problem. Although her son was not confronted with imminent danger of death at the time she submitted her application for Medicaid, she knew he could develop serious symptoms at any time. She thus decided that committing fraud was a lesser evil than not securing medical benefits to protect her son. Her act was not one of civil disobedience, the lawyer concedes. Understanding that Congress has declined to provide universal health insurance, his client believed that it would be useless to follow the steps that come under the rubric of “civil disobedience”: publicly seeking a change in the law, publicly disobeying the law, and then accepting punishment for one’s disobedience.