Stigma, Justice, and the Dilemma of Difference

What has stigma to do with justice? On the face of it, the answer is obvious: little if anything. Stigma involves situations where one individual or group treats another individual or group as less than fully human. Justice involves the fair distribution of outcomes and the procedures by which distributions are arranged. The conceptual overlap looks slight, at first blush. It seems hardly surprising, then, that scholars rarely mention the two terms in the same breath except, perhaps, to note that societies stigmatize some lawbreakers or to comment on the injustice of some stigmas.