Chapter 1 examines the court-based system of employee injury law that existed in the United States prior to the introduction of workers’ compensation in the 1910s. The purpose of this examination is to set up the rest of the book’s treatment of compensation laws. The chapter discusses the deficits and injustice of that system, but places particular emphasis on how this prior system included a wide range of meanings for injury and ways that injured people could make justice claims. The chapter also draws on philosopher Nancy Fraser’s writing to argue that a full treatment of injury requires us to have a multifaceted concept of justice concerned with issues of inequality and poverty but also respect and human dignity.