The United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 as a way of galvanising the international community to work together to meet our planet’s most urgent problems.  This lecture will explore the role universities can play in meeting these challenges. It will draw on the conceptual framework provided in the work of Amartya Sen (2009) by arguing that both university faculty and students can play a dynamic role in addressing remediable social injustice. With particular reference to SDG 16, which seeks to ‘provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions’ it will refer to the work of The Open University’s Open Justice Centre which has developed new pathways for university students to support access to justice. It will also seek to prompt a discussion of how students can engage with UNODC’s Education 4 Justice initiative to help build accountable and inclusive institutions, both during their studies and as they embark upon their professional careers.