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This project has asked contributors to undertake a critical review of the ideas of justice and injustice as they relate to Brexit. The book has asked whose justice is affected by Brexit? What justice is affected by Brexit? What does a just society look like? Whether Brexit is perceived as one of justice or injustice is related strongly to our perspective of the kind of British, European and global society we want and envisage. This project has also asked how can a ‘just’ Brexit be evaluated from an intellectual and methodological perspective, in order to assess our understanding of whether and how national and global governance affect the pursuance of a just society? This has been underpinned by the unique circumstance of Brexit, which concerns the situation of withdrawal from globalisation, or more specifically, an exit of a state from an international organisation. The diverse contributions in the book have been useful in enabling the book to make some observations about the ways in which the topic of Brexit is approached, and what this may expose about our use of frameworks, concepts and methodologies of (legal) research on Brexit.

Gary Chartier and Jere L. Fox’s chapter examines the relationship between natural law and the state. Contemporary natural law theorists, particularly those working in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, have tended to view the state as necessary to secure human flourishing. Chartier and Fox seek to undermine this assumption. Natural law theorists, they argue, should deny that the state is necessary or desirable to secure the common good. The authors draw attention to an alternative natural law tradition represented by evolutionary social theorists such as Adam Smith, Lysander Spooner, and Friedrich A. Hayek, arguing that these theorists’ understandings of the basis of social order holds lessons for adherents of the Aristotelian-Thomist outlook. Chartier and Fox begin their chapter by exploring the role of consensual social institutions in securing the common good (understood in a narrow sense as the good of just social order). They then critically assess the influential natural law arguments for state authority offered by Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, before explaining why non-state norms and institutions should be regarded as a viable route to ensuring social stability.