be presented more confidently and more effectively in political and philosophical argument. Its presentation can be associated with a sense that competing claims-to property, desert, or whatever-have had a fair chance of consideration in a way that takes their normative aspirations seriously. And this way of defending it will also be a way of illustrating and driving home the point that when claims of right are in the air, recourse to a utilitarian or economic matrix is not always appropriate. What follows is not a comprehensive survey. It is certainly not a comprehensive survey of theories of justice. Rawls's theory will often serve as an illustration, though in some places I will also consider Robert Nozick's theory of historical entitlement. The aim, however, is not to oppose these theories to one another but rather to get a taste of the variety of ways in which claims about socioeconomic rights may figure into a broader theoretical conception. Also, I will not offer an exhaustive review of the ways in which socioeconomic rights might be related to or emerge from a complex theory of justice. I have chosen seven main areas to focus on: (1) the role of considered judgments about welfare and the relief of poverty in the formation of a theory of justice, (2) the importance of scarcity and issues of priority in defining the agenda for justice and the constraints facing the proponents of any costly right, (3) the difference between allocative and structural/procedural approaches to justice, (4) the use of contractarian ideas to argue for particular principles of justice, (5) the importance that a theory of justice will attach to choice and personal responsibility, (6) the relation between first-best and second-best accounts, and (7) the relation between the more abstract and the more policy-oriented aspects of a theory of justice. Other facets of the relationship are no doubt worth examining too, but the ones I have listed will be enough to begin with. This Article is just a start; I hope it affords a basis for others to build on. II. OUR CONSIDERED JUDGMENTS Our theories of justice are motivated, driven, and to a certain extent constrained by what we sometimes call our intuitions about justice, but which might more accurately be described as our considered but on-thewhole pretheoretical judgments about some of the matters that justice deals with. Whether or not one adopts Rawls's methodology of reflective equilibrium,' 8 these considered judgments play an important role both in specifying what it is that we want to think about and also in fixing our sense of what we expect our theory of justice to validate or make sense of. They may also provide reality checks at various stages of our 18. 780 See RAwLs, supra note 4, at 40-46.