Rawls's Theory of Justice: An Impossibility Result

The theory of justice developed by John Rawls has been widely and correctly recognized as one of the great contributions to our understanding about the complicated relationships between social institutions and our notions about the morality of social actions. His work is having substantive impact on economics, and I suspect that the other social sciences including law are being similarly influenced. For me to add my own accolades here in view of this almost universal praise, would be anticlimactic at best; so let’s get straight to the point