This article engages with the seventh chapter of Ben Judah’s book, which tells the story of Nora, a girl from the Latvian city of Liepāja. Nora has been awarded a scholarship to study in Italy, but cannot afford the related costs, such as travel expenses. Seeing no other solution, Nora accepts the job offer of a scam company and eventually prostitutes herself online, quickly realising that she can earn enough to pay for her trip and also help her family. Judah’s chapter ends with Nora having collected enough money to finally move to Italy. The article first addresses how we understand Nora’s story and why we frame it in light of violence, abuse and a holistic perspective of gendered oppression and sex work. It then analyses the role that law plays (or does not play) in the context of her lived experience and everyday struggles. Zooming out of the legal framework, it tackles more systematic and structural issues underlying Nora’s trajectory. Finally, the article offers some methodological reflections on the meaning and implications of our legal engagement with the everyday.

The field of global mental health (GMH) is in transition. Following its emergence in the mid-2000s, the field is currently grappling with critiques concerning the presumed universality of its concepts and approaches; the focus on treatments rather than addressing social determinants of mental health; and a lack of equity between actors in the Global North and South. With the field at this junction, we describe three ways in which structural injustice (SI) theories can respond to calls for change within GMH. Following a brief discussion of key characteristics of SI theories, such as those put forward by Powers and Faden (2006, Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy. New York: Oxford University Press; 2019, Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press) and Young (2011, Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press), we first discuss how they can contribute to GMH by strengthening often-called-for inter- and transdisciplinarity, using well-being as a boundary object or bridging concept. Second, we argue that SI theories can inform data collection and analysis by offering a theoretical lens for analyzing the role of social context in well-being. Third, we discuss the potential benefits of the normative dimensions of SI theory. Engagement with normative dimensions may assist in addressing unfair knowledge practices in GMH. In addition, attention to normative dimensions of SI theories may help to make GMH research more responsive to the deeper-rooted structural determinants of mental health and multi-sectoral strategies to remedy these. We posit that, in this time of transition, SI theories provide a versatile resource to engage in much-needed transformations in the field of GMH.

Climate change presents a paradox for moral judgment: its harms are immense and predictable, yet they arise from diffuse collective processes that seem to frustrate attributions of blame. Thus, many believe responsibility can only be coherently understood in forward-looking, structural terms. I argue, however, that a small but powerful group of actors, which I call the “Carbon Axis,” bears responsibility in a thick, backward-looking sense. The standard excuses (e.g., insignificance, ignorance, and lack of intent), which may exculpate some ordinary contributions to harm, afford this group scant moral cover. If anyone is culpable for the climate crisis, the Axis is.

Can predictable impairments of epistemic performance constitute injustice in the absence of harassment, manipulation, or prejudicial credibility deflation? I use this question to examine a case drawn from ordinary intellectual exchange: in mixed-sex settings, some male speakers may be distracted by the perceived attractiveness of a female interlocutor, with consequences for how their arguments are received. I argue that, in the stipulated case, the man has not suffered an injustice and the woman has not wronged him. The philosophical puzzle is why that verdict is correct, given a tempting inferential pattern in recent work on epistemic injustice from patterned epistemic disadvantage, especially when identity-linked, to an injustice verdict. I argue that injustice ascriptions require epistemic harm, wrong-making features, and accountability. The resulting framework distinguishes epistemic misfortune and thin unfairness from genuine epistemic injustice and helps assess contemporary disputes about the scope of the concept.

Student-led philanthropy has emerged as a promising yet understudied model for redistributing philanthropic decision-making authority. While foundations often claim to advance social change, their grantmaking continues to favor large, professionalized nonprofits over grassroots organizations that directly confront structural injustice. This study asks: Can shifting decision-making power in philanthropy result in more justice-oriented funding? Using automated text analysis and a custom-built justice dictionary, we analyze the missions of over 2,200 nonprofits funded between 2011 and 2019 by two groups that draw from the same philanthropic entity: college and university students through The Philanthropy Lab and professional staff at The Once Upon a Time Foundation. Guided by Young’s (2011, Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press) theory of structural injustice, we assess grantees on four dimensions of justice: equity focus, systemic framing, rights-based language, and participatory ethos. Our findings reveal that student-led grantmakers are significantly more likely to support nonprofits with explicit commitments to justice. These results suggest that student-led philanthropy, while often framed as merely an educational tool, can also serve as a practical model for foundations seeking to reimagine grantmaking in more equitable, justice-oriented ways.

The ethics of the international monetary system (IMS) can be framed either as a case of background injustice or of structural injustice. Both ideas suggest that due to the background conditions, the interaction of agents, in a context of no rules, can lead to domination and unfairness. Moreover, both ideas emphasise the need to create regulation, or a structure, that prevents domination and unfairness. This article asks how (if at all) do monetary regimes, or each of the three scenarios that stem from the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, raise domination and unfairness. This article identifies domination and unfairness in both regimes with open capital markets: the one with floating exchange rates and the one with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, it offers a principle of non-domination, according to which institutions of the IMS ought to guarantee effective sovereignty of participant states or offer an equal distribution of this value when securing full effective sovereignty for all is not possible. For the last regime, of closed capital markets, this article identifies unfairness but no domination. By identifying domination and unfairness in each regime, this article proposes policies and regulation, or a structure, to prevent and mitigate these issues.

The transition toward addressing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses serious justice challenges. The just transition framework—originally developed within the U.S. labor movement to safeguard workers’ interests during shifts toward sustainable economies—has been proposed as a valuable framework for guiding the AMR transition. In the AMR context, similar conflicts of interests arise—such as those between farmers’ interest in maintaining routine antimicrobial use and the public interest in preserving their long-term effectiveness. This brief proposes enhancing the just transition framework by incorporating elements of Transitional Justice. Transitional justice has emerged as a practice aimed at addressing past political tragedies and building a more equitable future. While traditionally applied in post-conflict settings—such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa—transitional justice offers valuable tools for navigating conflicts rooted in past injustices and long-term uncertainty. One circumstance that makes transitional justice necessary in the context of AMR is the conflict between opposing views on the role the past should play in planning the transition. In this brief, we highlight key research gaps that the sciences, social sciences, and humanities should prioritize in order to better identify the conflicts and trade-offs that an AMR transition informed by a transitional justice framework must address.

After World War II, many countries, including Nigeria, embraced Keynesian “welfarist” policies to stimulate economic growth and enhance the well-being of their citizens. However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a global economic crisis prompted a shift towards neoliberalism, leading to the commodification of social institutions and the implementation of policies such as privatization, trade liberalization and deregulation in Nigeria. This shift had a significant impact on Nigeria’s socio-legal economy, particularly in terms of property rights in company ownership. The article raises concerns about the structural injustice and growing inequality resulting from these neoliberal policies. It advocates for a legal framework that addresses these issues and proposes reconceptualizing private property rights in company ownership in Nigeria. This proposed framework aims to counter the dominance and power of property-owning elites and mitigate the structural injustice induced by neoliberal policies in Nigeria.

Standard conceptions of discrimination cannot account for all that is morally wrong about discrimination, as they cannot explain how individual acts of discrimination wrong not only their direct target but also all members of the targeted social group. In response to this lacuna, I develop a comprehensive account according to which discrimination consists of two interdependent wrongs: to discriminate against B, A must, first, treat B worse than C in a way that is grave enough to make this differential treatment morally wrong; and second, A must do so in a way that is disrespectful to B and to the social group B is perceived to belong to.

The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in scholars working to supplement or challenge accounts of structural injustice. Almost without exception, scholars in this area assume that the move from personal responsibility to political or public responsibility will represent a net gain in justice, at least in modern liberal regimes. In this essay, I challenge this assumption and introduce the concept of “structural hobbling” as a parallel cause of injustice, but one whose origins derive from neutral state activities rather than from intentional bad faith or diffuse private action (as in structural injustice). Using health-care regulations as a lens, I offer two narratives of individuals navigating health-care regulations that demonstrate how seemingly neutral regulatory decisions create regressive hobbling effects. Structural hobbling challenges structural-injustice theorists to take more seriously the complex and often subtle ways in which apparently benevolent state activity can create downstream injustice, while adding complexity to existing narratives around public responsibility and what it demands.

This essay defends a new account of wrongful benefiting based on the principle of fair play. In particular, I argue that certain structurally-conferred group-based benefits or privileges can ground obligations on the part of innocent beneficiaries to relinquish specific gains for purposes of redistribution regardless of whether their receipt is sourced in wrongdoing or involves the imposition of harm upon relevant others. I call this approach to fair play reasoning externalist insofar as it turns on a novel conception of free-riding that eschews necessary appeal to beneficiaries’ mental states or volition. After presenting an empirical example to help illustrate the sort of benefiting at issue and distinguishing my account from arguments rooted in the notion of structural injustice, I defend it via what I call the extension argument, respond to two salient objections, and close by suggesting its potential political utility in the American context specifically.

Critics of medical aid in dying (MAID) often argue that it is impermissible because background social conditions are insufficiently good for some persons who would utilize it. I provide a critical evaluation of this view. I suggest that receiving MAID is a sort of “hard choice,” in that death is prima facie bad for the individual and only promotes that person’s interests in special circumstances. Those raising this objection to MAID are, I argue, concerned primarily about the effects of injustice on hard choices. I show, however, that MAID and other hard choices are not always invalidated by injustice and that what matters is whether the injustice can be remediated given certain constraints. Injustice invalidates a hard choice when it can, reasonably, be remedied in a way that makes a person’s life go better. I consider the implications of this view for law and policy regarding MAID.