Justifying Justice

Justifying Justice is a suite of eight companion essays designed to be read as a series — and to stand alone. Each applies sociological, criminological, zemiological, and legal theory to the problem of elder financial exploitation and abuse, building toward a single argument: prevention requires rights, not just awareness.

The series will be published in June 2026, in commemoration of World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. An inaugural presentation will be delivered as the keynote address at the Northern New England Regional FAST Conference — Hear Their Voices, Share Our Resources — hosted by FAST of New Hampshire and sponsored by AARP New Hampshire, on June 2, at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, Manchester.

Justifying Justice (cornerstone essay) — The title carries four meanings — justifying justice as a practice, a standard, a system, and an aspiration. This opening essay establishes the series’ central argument: that elder justice requires rights, not merely awareness, and that the legal architecture currently governing protective intervention inverts the protective logic it claims to serve. The series builds from that inversion toward its resolution: Concerned Persons — family members, friends, neighbors, and the professionals already in relationship with vulnerable older adults — practicing Upstandership℠ as the fields most effective and least recognized form of prevention.


1. The Stress Test — Elder justice as a field has built a rights-affirming rhetoric alongside a rights-displacing default. This essay applies pressure to that contradiction, asking whether the field’s foundational commitments survive contact with the systems that implement them.

2. From Dyad to Triad — Drawing on Georg Simmel’s sociology of the triad, this essay argues that elder financial exploitation inhabits the dyad — the most fragile social form — and that the field has too often replicated that fragility in the structure of its own protective responses. The Concerned Person is the structural third who makes protection possible.

3. Capable Guardians — Routine Activity Theory — developed by Cohen and Felson in 1979 — provides the operational logic for prevention: crime requires the convergence of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. Applied to elder justice, this essay argues that the Concerned Person already in relationship with the vulnerable adult is the most effective preventive element in the field — and that the legal system’s systematic exclusion of that person from protective proceedings is not a neutral administrative outcome but a structural guarantee of worse outcomes.

4. Circles of Support — Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory maps the relational architecture within which daily life unfolds. This essay develops “Circles of Support” as a prosocial framework for understanding how relational networks — professional and personal, formal and informal, and in unison — constitute the infrastructure of prevention, and how their attenuation recreates exactly the conditions that abuse and exploitation requires.

5. Lawful but Awful — Not all harm inflicted through guardianship is illegal. This essay examines the category of lawful but awful — practices that are technically permissible under current law but that produce outcomes indistinguishable from abuse — and asks what a rights-based framework requires of law that is structurally harmful without being formally unlawful.

6. Standing — The Concerned Person has no legal standing in the proceedings that determine the fate of the person they seek to protect. This essay traces the history and constitutional dimensions of that exclusion, drawing on victims’ rights scholarship and due process doctrine to argue that standing is not a procedural technicality — it is the field’s central rights failure.

7. Upstandership℠ — The final essay develops Upstandership℠ as a practice — not merely an ethic or a framework — grounded in the response-ability of Concerned Persons, professionals, and institutions to act in the name of justice. It charts the journey of the Concerned Person: alone at first, then alongside the professionals and systems that, properly structured, should amplify rather than displace their role.

Images: Mount Kearsarge, NH; summit, trail.