Democratic Justice and the Boundaries Problem Chiara Cordelli University of Exeter This article examines the way in which Albert Weale’s procedural account of democratic justice understands: (1) the boundaries of the democratic social contract, in terms of who is included or excluded from the contract; and (2) the boundaries of justice (i.e. the scope of entitlements and obligations of justice) that result from the contract. Either Weale’s empirical method justifies the problematic exclusion of certain groups of agents from the democratic contract and thus potentially from the scope of justice, or his method is not as empirical asWeale wants it to be, because in order to evaluate those exclusions as unjust and to prevent them, the theory needs to postulate thick moral standards that are independent from, and external to, democratic procedures. Furthermore, the boundaries of justice resulting from Weale’s empirical-contractarian theory are likely to lead to the absence of justice where it would be most needed, especially at the international level.These concerns notwithstanding,Weale’s book remains a highly significant contribution to both democratic theory and theories of justice, as well as to our understanding of the relationship between them. Keywords: democratic justice; social contract; exclusion; equality Albert Weale’s Democratic Justice and the Social Contract represents an ambitious and insight- ful contribution to theories of justice and democratic theory. In particular, it provides a highly original way of framing and understanding the relationship between them. By posing a democratic contract for mutual advantage among self-interested political equals as the source of principles of justice,Weale pushes us to reflect on whether social justice is at all possible without democracy. He also creates an interesting line of continuity between three different and potentially conflicting commitments. First, there is the commitment to procedural social justice – to find justifiable principles of political association for societies that should be understood as though they were social contracts (Weale, 2013, p. 19; future page references are to this volume). Second, there is the commitment to democratic equality – the parties in the social contract are equals insofar as they de facto enjoy rough equality of power (p. 23).And finally, there is the contractarian commitment to prudential rationality, which provides agents with reasons to form a contract for mutual advantage in the first place (pp. 12–13). Whether these three commitments can stand together in harmony is, I believe, the central challenge the book faces. Weale’s social contract theory is original also for its method. It adopts an empirical method of contractual reasoning as opposed to a hypothetical one (pp. 33–40). When building the procedure and modelling the contract,Weale does not construct a hypo- thetical situation according to some moralised and idealised understanding of how the parties ought to relate to each other as free and equal, along the lines of Rawls’s Original Position (Rawls, 1971). He rather models the conditions of the social contract on the basis of existing, well-functioning systems of cooperation in which conditions of equal power are, de facto, roughly realised (p. 14). Further,Weale rejects the moralised constructivist assumption that parties ought to be motivated by a desire to justify their claims to others POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2015 VOL 13, 196–206 doi: 10.1111/1478-9302.12085 © 2015 The Author. Political Studies Review © 2015 Political Studies Association