consideration what would ameliorate and what would aggravate an unjust situation? I do not mean that we must simply sit on our hands until the theorists of justice laboriously get around to considering second-best theory. But it is not clear how it is safe to proceed without someone doing some second-best theory-if only to be sure that the rights we propose to enforce actually do a good job of capturing what justice requires in this fraught and terrible situation. In this regard, Robert Nozick's comments about injustice in the real world are particularly interesting. Nozick was never prepared to say that the historical-entitlement critique of equality and welfarism in Anarchy, State, and Utopia amounted to a defense of actually existing market institutions, nor would he pretend that the sort of Lockean defense of property he advocated could go any distance towards legitimizing contemporary disparities of wealth in, for example, the United States. On the contrary, he thought it undeniable that contemporary holdings would be condemned as unjust by any remotely plausible conception of historical entitlement. (The point of Nozick's argument in chapters 7 and 8 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia was that egalitarians were condemning the existing distribution for the wrong reason-simply as unequal-rather than on account of the violence, fraud, expropriation, ethnic cleansing, and state corruption involved in the history of most holdings of property in America.) He acknowledged that once actual historical injustice was established, the burden would fall on the part of his conception dealing with the rectification of injustice. The ideal part of Nozick's theory might reject welfare transfers out of hand as violations of property owner's rights; it might condemn income taxes as amounting to illicit and coercive seizure of labor from honest workers. But he doubted whether these condemnations could be sustained once one started figuring out how to deal with the burden of actual injustice: These issues are very complex and are best left to a full treatment of the principle of rectification. In the absence of such a treatment applied to a particular society, one cannot use the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme of transfer payments, unless it is clear that no considerations of rectification of injustice could apply to justify it.82 That itself is a remarkable and honest concession. But if we accept it, we also have to accept the corollary that the schemes of transfer that seem most obvious to us-as proponents of socioeconomic rights-may not be exactly (or even approximately) the schemes of transfer that rectification requires. It may not be easy to say what rectification requires, but it is worth considering at the very least whether there are 82. 802 NOZICK, supra note 10, at 231.