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Transitional justice is about situations in which a society is moving from a state of injustice to justice, from oppressive government to government that respects the rule of law, from authoritarianism to democracy. It is concerned with the administration of justice across such a change of regime. Hence its central questions: to what extent, and in accordance with what standards, is it appropriate to judge events that occurred under the former regime? What kinds of processes, what forms of recovery or punishment, are appropriate in such circumstances?

These questions are commonly approached as though they concerned departures from strict justice in the interest of achieving national reconciliation and ensuring the success of the transition or simply as a concession to the fact that those who benefited from the former regime retain considerable power and therefore have to be appeased. Posner and Vermeule, for …