Reparations for Slavery and Other Historical Injustices — Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule — 2003

This article examines the moral, legal, and institutional problems surrounding reparations for slavery and other historical injustices. Posner and Vermeule analyze compensation theories, constitutional questions, historical reparations programs, and the practical difficulties of designing reparations systems across generations.

1. Reparations Are More Than a Moral Debate

2. Reparations Have Been Used Repeatedly Throughout History

3. Compensation-Based Reparations Face Major Problems

4. Restitution Creates a Stronger Case for Reparations

5. Reparations Depend on How We Understand Responsibility

6. Reparations Are Legally and Politically Complex

⭐ Star Facts

• The article argues that reparations are not a “natural category” with clear boundaries, but a broad set of policies tied together by family resemblance rather than one strict definition.
• Reparations often involve payments by people who were not the original wrongdoers to people who were not the original direct victims.
• The authors distinguish reparations from ordinary welfare programs by arguing reparations are justified through “backward-looking” corrective justice rather than future utility or redistribution alone.
• Germany paid over 100 billion Deutsche Marks in Holocaust reparations programs after World War II. ⭐
• The U.S. Japanese internment reparations program paid surviving internees $20,000 each, totaling roughly $1.65 billion. ⭐
• The article highlights that reparations have also been implemented for Indigenous land claims, radiation exposure victims, political repression in Chile, and victims of Communist expropriations in Eastern Europe. ⭐
• The authors argue that compensation theories struggle because they require constructing “counterfactual worlds” — imagining what victims’ lives would have looked like if the injustice had never occurred.
• The article raises the philosophical problem that many descendants of victims would not even exist if the historical injustice had never happened, complicating compensation claims.
• Restitution theories focus less on inherited suffering and more on whether unjust wealth or benefits can still be traced to current institutions or descendants.
• The article argues that constitutional barriers to reparations are often overstated, especially when reparations are structured broadly rather than as narrow racial classifications.