Higher education that presupposes a specific conception of justice does well in preparing students to make claims of justice from specific perspectives or positions. However, civic leadership students with a strong background in specific conceptions of justice are often not equipped with necessary skills, dispositions, and habits to exercise leadership in ways that can manage political contestation associated with competing claims of justice. Civic leadership for justice hinges on the ability to create conditions that can maintain and link public relationships to shared values. Maintaining a link between public relationships and shared values is what creates the possibility of an overlapping consensus to emerge around what is required of justice. Higher education that is anchored to a specific conception of justice promotes a form of moral reasoning that is unable to resolve contestation and disagreement. Justice education should prepare students to exercise leadership by designing, creating, and evaluating spaces that support and cultivate public reason. In this article the authors propose a framework that helps educators prepare civic leadership students to recognize and manage political contestation associated with claims of justice through the lens of public reason. The framework suggests that current forms of justice education fail to emphasize the appropriate content and curriculum associated with theories of justice, public narrative, and public deliberation. Justice education needs to prepare students to understand not only theoretical dimensions of how principles of justice are formulated, but also how to design teaching and learning spaces that prepare students to engage the public around issues of justice. The article demonstrates an approach to public reason that is connected to the philosophical structure developed by John Rawls (1970/2005), that can better prepare students to exercise leadership for justice.