Abstract

This paper explores connections between the history of racial stratification in the US and general calls for reparations. It establishes the historical basis, from colonial times to the present, of corrective justice claims against the federal government and suggests how they could properly be honored. Its normative basis is a political principle that already plays a basic role in American political thinking.

Section I considers the moral bases and limitations of reparations claims. The problems involved in validating such claims do not affect the corrective justice argument that the paper develops. Section II offers an historical overview of the federal government's role in promoting and sustaining racial subjugation and its failure to address the substantial inequities that remain. For two centuries, government was the center of a Racial Subjugation Project, which created deep-rooted inequalities that public policy now largely ignores.

Section III sketches a comprehensive program of corrective justice to address the entrenched legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It imagines a National Rectification Project that is morally required not only by the government's duty to insure equal opportunity for all of our society's children but also by corrective justice because the inequitable conditions are attributable to the government's own policies.

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David B. Lyons Contact Information

dbl@bu.edu
Boston University School of Law
765 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA 02215
USA
(617) 353-3135

Social Science Research Network:

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Presentation and Publication Information:

draft paper

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