The palpability of justice

This article explores how we might imagine, discover, and rehearse a ‘lived sense of justice’. It moves beyond insisting that law and justice are distinct, positing the promise of justice-in-the-making as a necessary counterpoint to notions of justice tied only to law, legality, and punishment. The article gestures towards the humanities – to poetry, the arts, literature – as a potential antidote to contemporary political and criminological paradigms that privilege punishment as an adequate response to injustice. Drawing on work by poet and literary critic Andrea Brady and political philosopher Charles Taylor, it looks to an emergent genre of self-conscious fiction being crafted by activists and organizers from within social movements. Based on discussion of this new genre, the article examines the extent to which ‘the poetic act’ can be understood to ‘both anticipate the future and speed its coming’.