Interdependence-generating goods will not arise unless actors view arrangements as right or correct. This perception gives rise to a preoccupation in communities with what is just. It necessitates the development of a theory of justice that coordinates with the theory of community developed above. Justice in relation to goods can be thought about in two forms: either as a matter of the good’s distribution ex ante or its correction ex post. Nevertheless, this two-fold structure is simplistic in that it fails to account for the fact that justice must promote an ideal of just relationships. The theory of justice developed in this chapter therefore posits that the interaction of distributive and corrective justice over time gives rise to transformative justice. The transformation in question relates both to the nature of the good and the attendant conception of a wrong. The chapter details how transformative justice is an outcome visible in both international and WTO law. At the same time, the chapter suggests that WTO law’s transformative justice is not perfectly just, a deficiency that gives rise to a continuing impetus at reform.

Rawls assesses conceptions of justice in terms of how stable a society governed by them would be. I describe how Rawls presents this view of stability differently in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. I then argue that G.A. Cohen’s objections to this view largely fail insofar as we grant Rawls the claim that the task of principles of justice is to provide fair terms of cooperation. But I then develop an objection to this claim by drawing on Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s treatment of the circumstances of justice. These circumstances are more capacious than Rawls allows. Nonetheless, contra Cohen, we can retain one of the key insights of Rawls’s project, which is that justice is fundamentally about realizing a certain kind of relationship rather than realizing a particular distribution of goods. I sketch a Kantian conception of the relevant relationship and consider the role stability plays in it.

Some commentators have expressed puzzlement about the influence a short paper of mine may have had on the development of John Rawls’s thought after the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971. The issue arises because Rawls said in the Introduction to Political Liberalism that my paper had played a role in the evolution of his views, yet readers have found it difficult to understand how or why it did so. By examining some of Rawls’s published and unpublished lectures from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and drawing on correspondence I had with him during those years, I try to provide some context for his remarks about my paper and to refresh people’s memory of the issues that were on Rawls’s mind during that period. This may help to illuminate the position he eventually arrived at in Political Liberalism and some of the motivations for it.