Complex Justice

In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages. Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical "judicial activism" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit the policy choices available to lower court judges, introducing complications the Supreme Court would not anticipate. He demonstrates that the Kansas City case is a model lesson for the types of problems that develop for lower courts in any area in which the Supreme Court attempts to create significant change. Dunn's exploration of this landmark case deepens our understanding of when courts can and cannot successfully create and manage public policy.

The need for informed analyses of health policy is now greater than ever. The twelve essays in this volume show that public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Integrating perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and public health, this volume illuminates the relationships between justice and health inequalities to enrich debates. Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice explores three questions: How do scholars approach relations between health inequalities and ideals of justice? When do justice considerations inform solutions to health inequalities, and how do specific health inequalities affect perceptions of injustice? And how can diverse scholarly approaches contribute to better health policy? From addressing patient agency in an inequitable health care environment to examining how scholars of social justice and health care amass evidence, this volume promotes a richer understanding of health and justice and how to achieve both. The contributors are Judith C. Barker, Paula Braveman, Paul Brodwin, Jami Suki Chang, Debra DeBruin, Leslie A. Dubbin, Sarah Horton, Carla C. Keirns, J. Paul Kelleher, Nicholas B. King, Eva Feder Kittay, Joan Liaschenko, Anne Drapkin Lyerly, Mary Faith Marshall, Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Jennifer Prah Ruger, and Janet K. Shim.

Unfulfilled legal needs are at a tipping point in much of the Canadian justice system. The Justice Crisis assesses what is and isn’t working in efforts to strengthen a fundamental right of democratic citizenship: access to civil and family justice. Contributors to this wide-ranging overview of recent empirical research address key issues: the extent and cost of unmet legal needs; the role of public funding; connections between legal and social exclusion among vulnerable populations; the value of new legal pathways; the provision of justice services beyond the courts and lawyers; and the need for a culture change within the justice system.

Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America is a much-needed volume that will make a significant contribution to the growing fields of comparative law and politics and Latin American legal institutions. The book moves these research agendas beyond the study of high courts by offering theoretically and conceptually rich empirical analyses of a set of critical supranational, national, and subnational justice sector institutions that are generally neglected in the literature. The chapters examine the region’s large federal systems (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), courts in Chile and Venezuela, and the main supranational tribunal in the region, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Aimed at students of comparative legal institutions while simultaneously offering lessons for practitioners charged with designing such institutions, the volume advances our understanding of the design of justice institutions, how their form and function change over time, what causes those changes, and what consequences they have. The volume also pays close attention to how justice institutions function as a system, exploring institutional interactions across branches and among levels of government (subnational, national, supranational) and analyzing how they help to shape, and are shaped by, politics and law. Incorporating the institutions examined in the volume into the literature on comparative legal institutions deepens our understanding of justice systems and how their component institutions can both bolster and compromise democracy and the rule of law. Contributors: Matthew C. Ingram, Diana Kapiszewski, Azul A. Aguiar-Aguilar, Ernani Carvalho, Natália Leitão, Catalina Smulovitz, John Seth Alexander, Robert Nyenhuis, Sídia Maria Porto Lima, José Mário Wanderley Gomes Neto, Danilo Pacheco Fernandes, Louis Dantas de Andrade, Mary L. Volcansek, and Martin Shapiro.

In Complex equality and the Court of Justice of the European Union: Reconciling Diversity and Harmonization, Richard Lang proposes that the EU’s judges adopt Walzerian Complex Equality as a complement to their existing, and unsatisfactory, test for equality based on Aristotle.

As scholarly work on crime, deviance, criminal justice, and social control advances and sophisticated methods of investigation develop, chapter authors demonstrate the methodological maturity and diversity of current empirical research in criminology and criminal justice.

This book will inspire and spark grassroots action to address the inequitable impacts of climate change, by showing how this can be tackled and the many benefits of doing so. With contributions from climate activists and engaged young authors, this volume explores the many ways in which people are proactively working to advance climate justice. The book pays special attention to Canada and the Great Lakes watershed, showing how the effects of climate change span local, regional, and global scales through the impact of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, with related economic and social effects that cross political jurisdictions. Examining examples of local-level activism that include organizing for climate-resilient and equitable communities, the dynamic leadership of Indigenous peoples (especially women) for water and land protection, and diaspora networking, Local Activism for Global Climate Justice also provides theoretical perspectives on how individual action relates to broader social and political processes. Showcasing a diverse range of inspirational and thought-provoking case studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, climate change policy, climate ethics, and global environmental governance, as well as teachers and climate activists.