January 24, 2011 
Speaking at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina former Green Czar Van Jones defined “social justice” as opposed to legal justice.
“Here’s how you know if you live in a society where there’s social justice: Would you be willing to take your life . . . write it on a card, throw it in a big pot with everybody else . . . reach in at random and pull out another life with total confidence that it would be a good life?
“Well, then you got some work to do.
“In other words, not to say that you would wind up exactly where you were before, but that you’d be able to have a good life . . . that you would be able to put it together . . . figure it out. If you don’t have that confidence then you don’t live in a country where there’s social justice. Because in a socially just, as opposed to a legally just . . . in a socially just world, since we’re all pretty much born equally ignorant we should have roughly equal chances to have good lives.
“You didn’t do anything particularly spectacular at the point of birth, such that you deserve all this. [He] That’s a high standard. What it means in a country like ours is we will constantly be striving. We won’t ever arrive there in all likelyhood. We’ll have a more perfect union, we won’t have a perfect union, but it can be more perfect and every generation has to figure out a way to move us closer to the reality of liberty and justice for all and not just the rhetoric.”
Liz Blaine 