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After a fatal police shooting, it is typical for city and police officials to view the family of the deceased through the lens of the law. If the family files a lawsuit, the city and police department consider it their legal right to defend themselves and to treat the plaintiffs as adversaries. However, reparations and the concept of “reparative justice” allow authorities to frame police killings in moral rather than legal terms. When a police officer kills a person who was not liable to this outcome, officials should offer monetary reparations, an apology, and other redress measures to the victim’s family. To make this argument, the article presents a philosophical account of non-liability hailing from self-defense theory that centers on the distinction between reasonableness and liability. Reparations provide a nonadversarial alternative to civil litigation after a non-liable person has been killed by a police officer. In cases where the officer nevertheless acted reasonably, “institutional agent-regret” rather than moral responsibility grounds the argument for reparations. Throughout the article, it is argued that there are distinct racial wrongs both when police kill a non-liable black person and when family members of a black victim are treated poorly by officials in the civil litigation process.

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I n his Second Treatise of Civil Government, John Locke puts the figure of the "known and indifferent judge" at the center of his social contract theory. 1 Equipped with the sobriety of reason by virtue of his dispassionate position, the impartial judge is uniquely able to choose a sentence that fits the crime. In the absence of an impartial judge, men are prone to respond to interpersonal wrongdoing with vengeance, meting out punishments that are disproportionate to the offense. A principle spanning both Roman law and English common law, nemo iudex in causa sua ("no man should be a judge in his own case"), provides the rationale for a common political authority whom all subjects must obey. In entering into the Lockean social contract, an individual's natural right of punishment is given up, and the personal justice of the state of nature is replaced by the impersonal justice of the state.The idea of nemo iudex in causa sua did not originate in the Second Treatise, nor did that of a social contract, but Locke was one of the first writers to link the logic of the two together. Everything that is familiar about contemporary Anglo-American criminal justice-the notion of "innocent until proven guilty", an adversary process in which a prosecutor must demonstrate guilt, judicial dress emblematizing detached officiality, the symbolic positioning of the judge between the prosecutor's table and the defendant's-can arguably be traced to the nemo iudex principle. Justice is a process that is controlled by a third party, the state, removed as far as possible from persons who are presumed to not be good judges in their own case.* Many thanks to Andrei Poama, who has been a truly fantastic editor, and to two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that have helped me tremendously in the revision process.