Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

Freedom and Authority: An Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy p. " Oxford Journal for Legal Studies (Spring 1987) 7 (1): 1-25. Rawls also modified the principles of justice as follows (with the first principle having priority over the second and the first half of the second having priority over the latter half):
Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties and only those liberties are to be guaranteed their fair value.

". He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition of liberal political philosophy. His magnum opus A Theory of Justice (1971) was hailed at the time of its publication as "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II" and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy.