This is a personal reflection, so your own incident is the right material. What matters is how you analyse it — the chapter comes back to this exercise on page 129 to explain substantive and procedural justice, so answer it in a way that sets that up.
What a good answer must contain — answer the four parts in order:
- The incident, told plainly in two or three sentences: what happened, who was involved, and what exactly was unfair about it.
- How you felt — name the feeling honestly (angry, humiliated, helpless, not believed). Notice whether the worst part was the loss itself or the fact that nobody heard your side.
- What would make it right — the chapter offers three possibilities: the wrong-doer should be punished, they should apologise, or you should be compensated in some way. Say which one you wanted, and why.
- Who could have set it right — a teacher, a parent, the class monitor, an elder, or an authority outside the school. This is the point of the exercise: someone neutral, who is not one of the two sides, has to decide. In a society, that neutral someone is the court.
Sample answer:
Two weeks ago our class was told that someone had broken a window in the science lab. A classmate said he had seen me near the lab that afternoon, and our teacher asked my parents to pay for the glass. I had been at cricket practice at that time and had not gone near the lab at all. I felt angry, but mostly I felt helpless — I was not asked a single question before the decision was made, so I never got the chance to say where I had been.
To make it right, I did not want my classmate punished; I wanted the decision reversed and my name cleared, and I wanted the real cause found out. The person who could have set it right was our class teacher, because she was not one of the two sides and could listen to both of us. When I asked her for five minutes and explained, she checked with the cricket coach and withdrew the demand.