Residues of Justice

In Residues of Justice, Wai Chee Dimock probes the conceit of justice as a matter of measurable equivalence—those iconic scales that promise perfect balance—and finds what she calls the “residues” left behind by any attempt to translate lived conflicts into commensurate terms. Opening with Aristophanes’ The Frogs and moving through Aristotle’s proportional ethics, Kant, Rawls, and Mill, Dimock shows how justice has long been imagined as a language of ratios, universals, and adequation. Against this dream of objective fit—good for good, evil for evil—she foregrounds the incommensurate: what gets lost in translation when law seeks punishment, philosophy seeks foundations, and both presume a common currency of value. Engaging Michael Sandel’s critique of liberal justice and Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care,” she reframes justice as one virtue among others, necessarily partial, historically contingent, and never exhaustive.

Dimock’s signal move is to put literature alongside law and philosophy as a third, stubbornly recalcitrant language of justice. Through close readings of American writers—from Whitman’s democratic personhood and Cooper’s punitive zeal to Rebecca Harding Davis’s economic dispossession, Howells’s compensatory aspirations, Warner’s luck, and Chopin’s rights—she tracks where commensuration thins, frays, or fails altogether. The result is a powerful argument that literary representation exposes the limits of juridical and philosophical balancing acts, insisting on the unweighable remnants that any settlement leaves behind—and inviting more capacious, humane supplements to our adjudicative ideals.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.