Legal Theory Blog: John Rawls at 100, "A Theory of Justice" at 50

John Rawls - the most influential legal philosopher of the past century - is paid just tribute by UVA legal philosopher Lawrence Solum.  For my part I can say only that the thick green book sat on my shelf partially read for many years.  He was urged upon me by a classmate Marilyn Morheuser, a former nun, civil rights activist in Milwaukee, who became the first director of the Education Law Center spawned by Rutgers professor Paul Tractenberg. Rawls, she said, believes in equal justice, in fairness.

Modest effort on my part showed that he said that you should choose the right rule from behind a veil - that you would not know whether you would be burdened or benefited by the rule you choose.  I got the idea - Rawls was in the ethical tradition of Immanuel Kant, whose Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals I had read.  Treat others as though they are ends in themselves, not means to an end.

As time went on I became a loyal reader of the NYU legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin who built on Rawls.  So my knowledge of Rawls is filtered that way - through others, but particularly Dworkin.  James Fleming organized a conference Rawls and Law at Fordham in 2003.  Dworkin's keynote address was a powerful critique of utilitarianism - a philosophy that had long repelled me as the antithesis of Kant.  So I embraced Dworkin's CONFESSION:

Some of you will have noticed a certain congruence between the positions in legal theory I say Rawls's arguments support and those I have myself tried to defend, and you may think this no accident. So I offer you a confession, but with no apology. The work of philosophical icons is rich enough to allow appropriation through interpretation. Each of us has his or her own Immanuel Kant, and from now on we will struggle, each of us, for the benediction of John Rawls. And with very good reason. As this conference shows, after all the books, all the footnotes, all the wonderful discussions, we are only just beginning to grasp how much we have to learn from that man.

- GWC

Legal Theory Blog: John Rawls at 100, "A Theory of Justice" at 50

By Lawrence Solum

Today is the the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Rawls, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.  Rawls was a key figure in the revitalization of moral and political philosophy.  This year, his most important work, "A Theory of Justice," marks its 50th anniversary.

It goes without saying that Rawls was a shaping influence on the development of political philosophy.  Rawls's work held center stage in academic debates and penetrated public discourse to an unprecedented degree.  Even today, 18 years and some months after his death, Rawls remains at the center of many of the most important debates in political philosophy, although technical debates in political philosophy are now removed by many layers of dense argumentation from Rawls's original ideas and arguments.  If I might make a prediction for which I cannot be held to account, it is my belief that Rawls will be read, studied, discussed, and debated for centuries.

A Theory of Justice was a big book, with many important ideas.  Some of these have made their way into the everyday lexicon of moral and political philosophy and normative legal theory.  Among these are reflective equilibrium, the original position with its veil of ignorance, and of course the two principles of justice, the equal liberty principle and the difference principle. Other ideas, such as the concept-conception distinction and the notions of ideal and nonideal theory remain hugely influential.  More broadly, "A Theory of Justice" put distributive justice at the center stage of political philosophy for decades.  "A Theory of Justice" bracketed questions about race and gender--and that omission itself gave rise to an important body of work that criticized Rawls but used Rawlsian ideas to remedy the lacunae in Rawls's own work.  "The Racial Contract" by Charles Mills and "Justice, Gender, and the Family" by Susan Moller Okin are just two of many critiques that spawned entire bodies of scholarship.  The critique of Rawls should be seen as one of his most important contributions to modern thought.

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