John Thibaut and Laurens Walker, former professors at UNC–Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, established the idea of procedural justice in their 1975 book Procedural Justice (though I’ll grant that they did little to advance the art of snappy book titles).185 Earlier, the literature maintained that if outcomes were just, people were happy. This was termed distributive justice, meaning that the end distribution of goods, awards, recognition, or whatnot was just. But that wasn’t true in reality. It’s like saying you care only about how much a salesman sells, not how they do it.
