Justice and Rights, Edited by Terence C. Halliday and K.K. Yeo. Langham Publishing (ISBN: 9781786410023) 2024.

Summary: Nicholas Wolterstorff in an inter-disciplinary conversation on the salience of justice and rights in Christian scholarship.

This work represents the inaugural volume in the Cross-Disciplinary Encounters with Theology series, developed in partnership with the Global Faculty Initiative. This initiative brings a global mix of scholars into dialogue “on key themes of the Christian faith, including justice and rights, created order, and the virtues.”

The plan of the work is for an outstanding scholar, in this case philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, to offer a framework on the theme in a “theological brief.” Then, in the second part of the book, contributors who are part of the 80+ member Global Faculty Initiative contribute response briefs reflecting their disciplinary insights, concerns, and questions. These range from a paragraph to a short paper in length. These are broken in six subsections: Justice Debates, Society and History, Law and Society, International and Global Justice, Justice in Biological, Physical, and Medical Sciences, and Justice and the Academy. Finally, Wolterstorff offers a concluding response, one in which he modifies his views at one point.

Wolterstorff, interacting with the extensive biblical material on justice proposes two forms of justice. First order justice is simply giving each person his due. Second order justice are all those measures taken when first order justice is not practiced. The idea of each person’s due, or right means that Wolterstorff grounds his theory of justice in rights, which include both non-conferred and conferred rights, the former inherent in our embodied human life. Wolterstorff frames an argument for the importance of rights and then discusses justice in the academy. Finally, he surveys the disciplines considering how justice might relate to fields as diverse as history and gender studies to architecture and engineering. He leaves scholars with questions they might consider for each of their disciplines and for their academic institutions.

In what follows, I will highlight a few of the scholar’s responses in each of the parts of the middle section of the book.

Justice Debates. Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. leads off the discussion with a marvelously concise summary of Thomist thought on justice with trenchant observations on justice in the academy. Two other responses were noteworthy for me. One was Oliver O’Donovan’s difference with Wolterstorff on the existence of “first order” justice. The other was argument for love superseding justice for Christians with Osam Temple offering the most extensive articulation.

Society and History. John Coffey leads off with an essay on the role of history in telling the story of justice and injustice. Peter Sloman discusses polices of distribution as they relate to justice. Ian Robert Davis, an architect, offers remarkably practical implications of doing justice in reducing the risk of harm from disasters.

Law and Society. The two opening briefs stood out for me. Christopher Marshall assesses the restorative justice movement and some of the dangers when such solutions are institutionalized. Nicholas Aroney’s “Justice, Judgment, and the Virtue of Law” explores the grounding of rights. He also discusses such matters as Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty and the idea of subsidiarity.

International and Global Justice. Donald Hay and Gordon Menzies get into the challenging area of economic justice in climate change, particularly in fixing the costs of remediation. Given the global character of many problems, Terence C. Halliday argues for Transnational Legal Orders.

Justice in Biological, Physical, and Medical Sciences. Ian Hutchinson, a nuclear scientist, explores what justice in science means, including the just treatment of nature. Tyler VanderWeele offers a thought-provoking exploration of justice in public health, particularly the right to the “highest attainable standard of health.”

Justice in the Academy. Dinesha Samaratne offers a challenging perspective from the global south on the matter of academic publishing. For example, he highlights the injustices that prevent Global South scholars from publishing in leading journals. On a somewhat related note, Carlos Miguel Gomez raises questions of epistemic justice, particularly the exclusion of traditional or indigenous knowledge.

I should note that there were many other valuable contributions in each of these parts.

One of the remarkable qualities of this work is the gracious quality of the interaction, even where scholars differed from Wolterstorff. And his response was equally gracious. He corrects his own reading of Aristotle and Ulpian on justice. He expands his outline of a biblical concept of justice. Then he addresses his focus on justice, which seemed to exclude other aspects of the moral life. Finally, Wolterstorff addresses those uneasy about his assertion of rights talk and amplifies his discussion of natural rights and duties.

This is an outstanding compendium on the theme of justice and rights from a Christian perspective. It models gracious interdisciplinary dialogue at a high intellectual level. It includes a global mix of scholars from every continent. And it consciously seeks to ground all of this thinking in a biblical Christian framework. I look forward to future volumes in this series!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.