Justice as Recognition of Intellectual Rights

Sor Juana experienced injustice not through theft or violence in the conventional sense, but through the denial of her right to intellectual life—the confiscation of her books, the demand for her silence, the erasure of her authority over her own ideas. Her concept of justice demanded recognition: that her mind and its products belonged to her. Libertarian justice, through this lens, must prioritize intellectual and creative rights as fundamental. Justice means recognizing that you own your thoughts, that no one can legitimately command your silence, that your intellectual labor generates property claims. It means protecting the conditions under which people can think freely, create without coercion, and benefit from their own knowledge production. This reframes justice from a focus on redistributing physical property to defending the very foundations of intellectual autonomy. Sor Juana's life shows that without this recognition, all other rights remain precarious—a person denied authority over their own mind cannot be truly free.