Justice, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is the stable character trait of giving people what they deserve. As Catholic social teaching emphasizes, a key thing all humans deserve is respect for their lives and dignity.

During our Week of Justice, the University Libraries invites you to explore a curated collection of resources that bring the cardinal virtue of justice to life. These resources highlight fairness, responsibility, and respect for others through powerful stories and thoughtful perspectives. Whether you prefer to watch, read online, or flip through a physical book, there’s something here to inspire reflection and character growth.

Streaming Films

• 12 Angry Men – This classic courtroom drama demonstrates the pursuit of justice against prejudice, as one juror attempts to convince others to rethink their biases.
• Banned Together – Follows three students and their adult allies as they fight to reinstate 97 books suddenly pulled from their school libraries.
• Dead Man Walking – Moving portrayal of real-life nun Helen Prejean, who develops a bond with a death-row inmate, in this powerful adaptation of Prejean’s memoirs.
• Just Mercy – A film about the true story of lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s fight to free a wrongfully convicted man from death row while exposing deep injustices in the U.S. legal system.
• Monsenor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero – Chronicles Archbishop Óscar Romero’s transformation into a fearless voice for El Salvador’s oppressed and his ultimate martyrdom after speaking out against state violence and injustice.
• Nelson Mandela: The Freedom Fighter – A documentary chronicling Nelson Mandela’s journey from Thembu royalty to anti-apartheid leader, his 27-year imprisonment, and his rise as South Africa’s first Black president who inspired the world.
• On the Basis of Sex – Young wife, mother and lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg battles the U.S. Supreme Court for gender equality and women’s rights.
• Stonewall Uprising – The film depicts the 1969 Stonewall riots, when a routine police raid on a New York City gay bar sparked days of protests that became a turning point in the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.
• The Central Park Five – A documentary re-examining the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case and the group of Black and Latinx teenaged boys at the center of it, now more commonly referred to as the Exonerated Five.
• The Hate U Give – Based on the bestselling novel by Angie Thomas, this film centers on a teenage girl who witnesses a police shooting and must find her voice as she confronts racism, injustice, and the pressure of two very different worlds.

eBooks

• Disability Ethics and Preferential Justice: A Catholic Perspective – Mary Jo Iozzio argues that Catholic social teaching calls for a preferential commitment to persons with disabilities by recognizing their full dignity and reshaping ethical, social, and ecclesial practices toward justice and inclusion.
• Living Justice: Catholic Social Teaching in Action (3rd edition) – Presents Catholic social teaching as a living moral framework that calls individuals and communities to respond actively to issues of human dignity, economic justice, peace, and care for creation through informed action and solidarity.
• Pope Francis as Moral Leader: Ethicist, Discerner, Communicator, and Advocate for Social Justice – This book examines how Pope Francis exercises moral leadership by integrating ethical reasoning, spiritual discernment, and effective communication to address global issues such as poverty, inequality, and care for creation through a justice-centered Catholic vision.
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander argues that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a modern racial caste system by disproportionately targeting and marginalizing Black Americans through mass incarceration under the guise of race-neutral policies.
• The Virtues – John Garvey argues that virtues are stable habits of character that shape how we choose and act, and that a good society depends less on rules or rights than on cultivating these moral excellences in individuals.
• Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues: A Summa of the Summa on Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage – Presents carefully selected and annotated passages from the Summa theologiae that clearly introduce Aquinas’s teaching on the cardinal virtues. Designed for beginners or independent readers.
• Tolerance among the Virtues – This book offers insights into how to live amid differences we cannot endorse—beliefs we consider false, actions we think are unjust, institutional arrangements we consider cruel or corrupt, and persons who embody what we oppose.
• Whose Justice? Which Rationality? – Alasdair MacIntyre argues that concepts of justice and rationality are inseparable from the moral traditions that shape them, and that modern moral disagreement persists because rival traditions employ fundamentally different standards of reasoning.

Print Books

• I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban – Tells the story of Malala Yousafzai’s fight for girls’ education in Pakistan and her resilience after surviving an assassination attempt for speaking out against oppression.
• Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection.
• Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective – In this book, author Jean Porter, shows that Aquinas offers us a cogent and illuminating account of justice as a personal virtue rather than a virtue of social institutions.
• Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? – Michael Sandel introduces major moral and political philosophies and uses real-world dilemmas to show how different theories of justice shape our understanding of fairness, rights, and the common good.
• Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning – Cathy Park Hong blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore the quiet anger, shame, and alienation produced by racism, assimilation, and invisibility in Asian American life.
• The Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance – New translation of texts from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica II–II—on the virtues prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
• The Virtues – In this series of excerpts from his homilies, addresses, and encyclicals, Pope Benedict XVI draws on the lives of saints, the Catechism, and common experiences to bring us into a deeper understanding of the virtues and how to cultivate them in our own lives so that we can grow closer to the Lord.
• Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives – Linda Villarosa argues that racism is a fundamental cause of persistent health disparities in the United States, shaping disease, medical care, and life expectancy through chronic stress and structural inequality.

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