A foundational Rawlsian liberty—the right to develop and exercise intellectual capacities—becomes concrete through Sor Juana's struggle for access to books, study, and public voice.
Rawls's first principle of justice guarantees equal basic liberties, including the freedom to develop one's talents. Sor Juana's life embodies the stakes of this principle: she was denied formal education, restricted from certain texts, and pressured to abandon scholarship for religious obedience. Yet she seized knowledge anyway, teaching herself languages, mathematics, and theology, and defending her right to do so publicly. Her tradition reveals that Rawlsian justice requires not passive non-interference but active removal of barriers—libraries open to women, education funded regardless of gender, intellectual work valued equally. For practitioners designing just institutions, this means asking: who is systematically prevented from pursuing knowledge? What permissions or credentials are withheld unfairly? Sor Juana's defiant scholarship shows that recognizing equal intellectual liberty demands confronting entrenched systems that gatekeep wisdom.
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