Subjective value judgments of distributive justice and legal decision-making

Distributive justice is a fundamental issue in the legal decision-making. We use Savage’s framework to derive a representation of subjective value judgments of distributive justice from the coherence of the decision-maker’s preferences over income distributions. The representation function can incorporate, in a unified way, the widely held beliefs such as inequality aversion, desert, and egalitarianism. We illustrate the application of the justice representation functions in law and economics by studying the distribution rules for different beliefs of distributive justice. © 2018, The Japan Section of the Regional Science Association International.