Economic Justice

About: Economic Justice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41600 publications have been published within this topic receiving 661535 citations.

Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice

Abstract: The widespread but virtually invisible problem of pesticide drift -- the airborne movement of agricultural pesticides into residential areas -- has fueled grassroots activism from Maine to Hawaii. Pesticide drift accidents have terrified and sickened many living in the country's most marginalized and vulnerable communities. In this book, Jill Lindsey Harrison considers political conflicts over pesticide drift in California, using them to illuminate the broader problem and its potential solutions. The fact that pesticide pollution and illnesses associated with it disproportionately affect the poor and the powerless raises questions of environmental justice (and political injustice). Despite California's impressive record of environmental protection, massive pesticide regulatory apparatus, and booming organic farming industry, pesticide-related accidents and illnesses continue unabated. To unpack this conundrum, Harrison examines the conceptions of justice that increasingly shape environmental politics and finds that California's agricultural industry, regulators, and pesticide drift activists hold different, and conflicting, notions of what justice looks like. Drawing on her own extensive ethnographic research as well as in-depth interviews with regulators, activists, scientists, and public health practitioners, Harrison examines the ways industry, regulatory agencies, and different kinds of activists address pesticide drift, connecting their efforts to communitarian and libertarian conceptions of justice. The approach taken by pesticide drift activists, she finds, not only critiques theories of justice undergirding mainstream sustainable-agriculture activism, but also offers an entirely new notion of what justice means. To solve seemingly intractable environmental problems such as pesticide drift, Harrison argues, we need a different kind of environmental justice. She proposes the precautionary principle as a framework for effectively and justly addressing environmental inequities in the everyday work of environmental regulatory institutions.

Transport Justice: Designing fair transportation systems

Abstract: Transport Justice develops a new paradigm for transportation planning based on principles of justice. Author Karel Martens starts from the observation that for the last fifty years the focus of transportation planning and policy has been on the performance of the transport system and ways to improve it, without much attention being paid to the persons actually using – or failing to use – that transport system. There are far-reaching consequences of this approach, with some enjoying the fruits of the improvements in the transport system, while others have experienced a substantial deterioration in their situation. The growing body of academic evidence on the resulting disparities in mobility and accessibility, have been paralleled by increasingly vocal calls for policy changes to address the inequities that have developed over time. Drawing on philosophies of social justice, Transport Justice argues that governments have the fundamental duty of providing virtually every person with adequate transportation and thus of mitigating the social disparities that have been created over the past decades. Critical reading for transport planners and students of transportation planning, this book develops a new approach to transportation planning that takes people as its starting point, and justice as its end.

The Color of Crime

Abstract: justice. The legal evolution from the slave codes to the Black codes to Jim Crow legislation, establish a clear link to the operation of today's criminal justice system. This chapter concludes with a list of six principles that are minimally required for a racially-fair criminal justice system. Perhaps most problematic in the current system, is the question of whether their are adequate checks and balances that mitigate against racial bias in the legal system. "Racial Discr imina tion or Disproport iona te Offending?" (Chapter 3) offers a detailed critique of how mainstream criminologists measure discrimination. The problems of beginning a discrimination analysis with the formal stages of the justice system (e.g., arrest), as well as the problems of generalizing from single and multi-stage discrimination studies are discussed. Racial discrimination is not limited to the formal stages. The phenomenon of "DWB" (Driving While Black) is perhaps the best counterpoint to mainstream analysis. Police stops which do not result in arrest do not trigger the formal stage, therefore, fall outside typical measures of racial discrimination. The perception that many Blacks have, particularly Black men, that they are targeted by the police is not a lightweight matter. The perception and reality of disproportionate minority targeting has everything to do with how minorities view the justice system and its legitimacy. For good or ill, a book which purports to be about race and crime would not be complete without some discussion of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. In Chapter 4, "Are we Still Talking About O.J.?," the focus is upon the criminal trial as a Rorschach test rather than an isolated, rare event. Although we were bombarded, ad nauseam, with the criminal trial, very little of the data and analysis were new. Much of media discussion was an outgrowth of the early polls, which showed that there was a deep Black/White racial divide in the case. This chapter is a critique of both the media presentations of all-things O.J., and what the media failed to present about the case. The common portrayal was that Blacks were on one side of the fence, shouting down an equal number of Whites on the other side. Very little of the media images showed that there were more Whites --in actual numbers--who believed in Simpson's innocence, than there were Blacks. There were so many unanswered questions, including, were perceptions about Simpson's guilt partly attributable to one's class status? Too few polls reported data on the intersection of class and race. Further, why were so many Blacks so quick to jump to O.J. Simpson's defense? This chapter attempts to reconcile how Simpson, viewed by himself and others as "colorless," became a symbol of racism in the criminal justice system. How did this