On Justice as Dance

This article is part of a larger project that explores how to channel people’s passion for popular arts into legal social justice by reconceiving law as a kind of poetry and justice as dance, and exploring different possible relationships between said legal poetry and dancing justice. I begin by rehearsing my previous new conception of social justice as organismic empowerment, and my interpretive method of dancing-with. I then apply this method to the following four “ethico-political choreographies of justice”: (1) the choral dance of souls qua winged chariot-teams (from Plato), (2) a dancingly beautiful friendship with the community (from Aristotle), (3) a tightrope-dance of the cool (from Al-Farabi), and (4) humans dancingly reimagined as positioned actors in fluidly moving groups (from Iris Marion Young). I then synthesize these analyses into “dancing justice,” defined as the dynamic equilibrium sustained by a critical mass of a community’s members comporting themselves like social dancers.