Senses of Sen: Reflections on Amartya Sen’s Ideas of Justice

This review essay explores how Amartya Sen’s recent book, The Idea of Justice, is relevant and important for the development and assessment of transnational theories and applications to transnational justice and legal education programs. The essay captures a trans-jural dialogue of multinational scholars and teachers, discussing Sen’s contributions to moral justice theory (criticizing programs for “transcendental institutionalism” (like Rawlsian theory) and instead focusing on “comparative broadening” including empirical, relative, and comparative assessments of programs to ameliorate injustice in the world in its comparative concreteness (as in Indian social justice theory and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and related work). The authors are professors in the transnational legal education program, the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, sponsored by over 25 different law schools, located in London. They teach courses in a wide variety of subjects, including comparative legal theory, constitutional law, business and legal ethics, moral and legal philosophy, international and comparative law, capital markets and business law, emergency powers, international dispute resolution and a variety of other common and civil law subjects