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In virtually all formulations, social justice is often understood to capture something other than justice in general or claims about basic rights. Usually, social justice invokes substantive rather than formal equality. Some theorists define social justice as involving "the goals of equality of access, opportunity, and outcome." The focus on outcome distinguishes it from "equality of opportunity" or "equality under law," normative goals that may frustrate substantive equality. It is common to adopt an approach that "presupposes a conception of social justice that provides a standard for assessing the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society." Marcia Bok, Civil Rights and the Social Programs of the 1960s: The Social Justice Functions of Social Policy 15 (1992). Thus, most social justice research deals with issues of allocation. Social justice issues, however, often extend beyond issues of economic or distributive justice and embrace as well issues of human dignity and solidarity. According to David Smith, the term social justice may be "simultaneously distributional and relational." Here, perhaps, this latter sense is where a local government can make a difference. As Smith elaborates: The term social justice is taken to embrace both fairness and equity in the distribution of a wide range of attributes, which need not be confined to material things. Although the primary focus is on attributes which have an immediate bearing on people's well -being or the quality of their lives, our conception of social justice goes beyond patterns of distribution, general and spatial, to incorporate attributes to how these came about. While fairness is sometimes applied to procedures and justice to outcomes, we are concerned with both. Preference for the term social justice rather than justice in general is explained not by preoccupation with the distribution of attributes which might be labeled as social, but by concern with something which happens socially, among people in a society. -David Smith, Geography and Social Justice 26 (1994). The moral philosopher his Marion Young also extends social justice beyond issues of distribution. For her, "social justice means the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression." Justice and the Politics of Difference 15-16 (1990). Traditional theories of justice tend to restrict the meaning of social justice to "the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society's members." As Smith and Young admonish, the Board must recognize that distributive issues are crucial to a satisfactory conception of justice, but it would be a significant mistake to reduce social justice to distributional inequity. Following the lead of Young, then, as a governmental entity, the Board's goal of social justice should focus as well, if not primarily, on the social structure and institutional contexts that often help determine distributive relationships, patterns, and outcomes. Intervene there. H. What is the place of rights within a social justice vision? The social justice tie to rights dates back to the nation's Declaration of Independence in 1776. The nation voiced the now familiar vision of democracy in which "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' are inalienable rights, "consent of the governed" legitimates the power of government, and all citizens are "created equal." Today, across the land, the achievement of these ideals remains relevant to social justice advocacy. As Thurgood Marshall pointed out on the occasion of the bicentennial of the Constitution, the negotiation of these ideals have involved a constant struggle, noting that the government devised in Philadelphia "was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for individual freedoms and human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . ORANGE Cou TYSOcmL JusrtcE GOAL REPORT Page 2j of 59.,