Plato's "Republic" and "Laws" make justice the central political and philosophical concept, defining it as each part of the soul and state performing its proper function, and poets from Virgil to Milton have engaged with this philosophical account of justice as cosmic order; In the tradition of protest poetry — Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan — justice is not a philosophical abstraction but an urgent political demand, and the poem becomes an instrument for articulating what justice requires and shaming what refuses it; A poet writing about criminal justice might use Rawls's philosophical account — justice as what rational persons would choose from behind a "veil of ignorance" about their social position — to evaluate the existing system against an impartial standard; Derrida's "Force of Law" argues that justice (as opposed to law) is always to come, never present — it is the impossible ideal that drives legal reform without ever being fully achieved — and this concept of justice-as-arrival informs poems that maintain the claim of justice even when its realization seems impossible; The social contract tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) grounds political justice in consent and mutual obligation, and poets writing about political legitimacy draw on these philosophical resources to assess whether existing institutions meet their own stated conditions of justice; Weil's concept of justice as attentiveness — the just person is one who truly sees the other in their concrete particularity, without projection or reduction — provides a philosophical framework for reading the lyric's close attention as an ethical and political practice