What does justice really mean? In this powerful long-form episode, TJ breaks down the word that lives at the heart of courtrooms, protests, and moral debates around the world. From Hammurabi to hip-hop, Supreme Court rulings to superhero stories, we trace justice’s tangled roots through language, law, and culture—and ask whether it can ever truly live up to its name.

Links to Supreme Court Cases Referenced:
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Korematsu v. the United States
Buck v. Bell

Sources

• Oxford English Dictionary – "justice," "just"
• Online Etymology Dictionary
• The Code of Hammurabi, translation archives
• Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
• U.S. Supreme Court rulings: Dobbs v. Jackson, Students for Fair Admissions
• United Nations: Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Orlando Patterson, Freedom and Slavery and Social Death
• Legal linguistics and comparative law journals
• Translations and cultural references from Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Zulu, Mandarin

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