ABSTRACT
In a speech televised live just hours after the US military killed Osama Bin Laden, Barack Obama declared, ‘And on nights like this one, we can say to the families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done’ (White House 2011). While elsewhere in the speech Obama asserts that Bin Laden’s death advances the interests of the nation as a whole, he identified victims’ families, not the nation generally, as the entities in whose name justice had been done. That justice is a matter concerning individual victims and their families rather than society as a whole is the language of the victims’ rights movement.
