Elaine Riddick was 14 when she was sterilized by the state of North Carolina, immediately following the birth, by cesarean section, of a son, her only child. Although she scored above the state's IQ threshold of 75, the five-person Eugenics Board approved the recommendation for her sterilization, labeling Riddick "feebleminded" and "promiscuous" and noting that her schoolwork was poor and that she did not get along well with others.

For almost 30 years, she has sought compensation for this injury. She was among the first to bring a civil case against the state, a case she lost, in the 1970s, and she has been one of the most outspoken sterilization victims, appearing on NBC's Rock Center and on Al Jazeera. And yet she acknowledges that no amount of money can ever repair the damage the state did to her. "You cannot put a price tag on motherhood," Riddick said.

What would she have given to have more children? "I would have given up my life. My whole life."

If monetary compensation$10 million to be divided among the fewer than 3,000 living victims in 2015will not address the wrongs done to the 7,600 people sterilized by the state of North Carolina, then what is the point of adding millions of dollars to the budget of a state with a struggling economy? The answer may lie with the legal theory of transitional justice, a method of confronting legacies of human rights abuses through criminal prosecution, truth commissions, reparations and institutional reform.

Transitional justice addresses the primary objections of those resistant to expensive, government-funded programs, namely that financial compensation will not make victims whole again, and taxpayers should not have to pay for something they did not do. The practice can be traced back to the Nuremberg Trials, and more recent examples include the truth commissions in South Africa, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.

Though the genocide and war crimes investigated by those trials and commissions may seem far removed from the experiences of those targeted by North Carolina's Eugenics Board, forced sterilization is in fact a violation of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article XVI states: "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. [...] The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State." According to the United Nations, measures disrupting the reproductive acts of a group can also be considered genocide.

David Gray, a University of Maryland law professor, has written that transitional justice is not a matter of "ordinary justice." It is not about making victims whole again, as in tort law (for instance in the case of genocide, nothing will do that), or about the assignment of blame for past wrongs. Gray says transitional justice is "Janus-faced," ideally addressing both "an abusive past and a future committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law."

Monetary compensation does not seek to restore the victims to their earlier conditions but to help correct the status injustice they experienced, and also to establish a "pre-commitment" from the state that the wrong they experienced will never happen again. According to Gray, the cost is best borne by the state, even if those in power were not involved or even alive during the time of the abuses, as an expression of that commitment. "'I didn't do it' is a non sequitur when the fundamental question is 'How do we make it right?'"

I asked Gray how North Carolina could both recognize the state's abusive past and ensure that it never happens again.

His first suggestion was a public, accessible archive of documents related to the program (one already exists online, but is not comprehensive). "That way," he said, "there can never be a dispute about what happened."

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How do eugenics victims find justice?