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<br />While social justice seeks a more just society in general, it focuses most directly on a constituency of those who are
<br />marginalized, subordinated, excluded, and underrepresented. We must ask: "What is the injustice they experience?
<br />What is the justice they seek?" Without asking these questions, it will be hard to respond to their legitimate
<br />expectations. According to Indigenous Australia, "Social justice means being entitled to the same rights and services
<br />as all other citizens." Ask yourself, perhaps from a privileged position, what is social justice? Indigenous Australia
<br />answers: "Social justice is what faces you in the morning. It is awakening in a house with adequate water supply,
<br />cooking facilities and sanitation. It is the ability to nourish your children and send them to school where their
<br />education not only equips them for employment but also reinforces their knowledge and understanding of their
<br />cultural inheritance. It is the prospect of genuine employment and good health: a life of choices and opportunity,
<br />free from discrimination."4
<br />As members of the Orange County community wake up, what do they see? What basic necessities, if any, are
<br />absent? What frustrates their hope? What opportunity-denying circumstances constrain them? What, in the name of
<br />social justice, can this local governmental body do to provide redress and close inequality gaps?
<br />I recently co-authored a law book of cases and materials on social justices After an extensive literature review, we
<br />concluded that there is no single vision of social justice among the theorists who use this term. Some use the phrase
<br />social justice interchangeably with the term justice. Some use the concept as a counterpoint to injustice, to convey
<br />idealistic humanitarian goals..Others view social justice as requiring a higher moral ground than self-interest. In
<br />Europe, for instance, many nations attempt to harmonize economic efficiency and social justice. And there are some
<br />who use the term to describe particular aspects of freedom, such as freedom of speech or freedom from arbitrary
<br />searches, seizures, and detention.
<br />In virtually all formulations of the concept, social justice is understood to capture something other than justice in
<br />general or claims about basic rights. Usually, social justice invokes substantive rather than formal equality. Some
<br />theorists define social justice as involving "the goals of equality of access, opportunity, and outcome." The focus on
<br />outcome distinguishes it from "equality of opportunity" or "equality under law," normative goals that may frustrate
<br />substantive equality.
<br />It is common to adopt an approach that "presupposes a conception of social justice that provides a standard for
<br />assessing the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society.s6 Thus, most social justice research deals with
<br />issues of allocation. Social justice issues often extend beyond issues of economic or distributive justice, however,
<br />by also embracing issues of human dignity and solidarity. According to David Smith, the term social justice may be
<br />"simultaneously distributional and relational," and it is in this regard that a local government can make a difference:
<br />"The term social justice is taken to embrace both fairness and equity in the distribution of a wide range of
<br />attributes, which need not be confined to material things. Although the primary focus is on attributes which
<br />have an immediate bearing on people's well-being or the quality of their lives, our conception of social
<br />justice goes beyond patterns of distribution, general and spatial, to incorporate attributes to how these came
<br />about. While fairness is sometimes applied to procedures and justice to outcomes, we are concerned with
<br />both. Preference for the term social justice rather than justice in general is explained not by preoccupation
<br />with the distribution of attributes which might be labeled as social, but by concern with something which
<br />happens socially, among people in a society."~
<br />The moral philosopher Iris Marion Young also extends social justice beyond issues of distribution. For her, "social
<br />justice means the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression."$ Traditional theories of justice tend to
<br />restrict the meaning of social justice to "the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society's
<br />members." As Smith and Young admonish, the Board must recognize that distributive issues are crucial to a
<br />satisfactory conception of justice, but it would be a significant mistake to reduce social justice to distributional
<br />inequity. Following Young's lead, the Board's goal of social justice should focus as well, if not primarily, on the
<br />social structure and institutional contexts that often help determine distributive relationships, patterns, and outcomes.
<br />Intervene there.
<br />II. What is the place of rights within a social justice vision?
<br />The concept of social justice can be linked back to the nation's Declaration of Independence in 1776. The nation's
<br />founders voiced the now familiar vision of democracy in which `life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' are
<br />inalienable rights, `consent of the governed' legitimates the power of government, and all citizens are `created
<br />equal.' Today, across the land, the achievement of these ideals remains relevant to social justice advocacy. As
<br />OR411'GE COL~'T3'SOCLAL JUSTICE GOAL
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