Corrective Justice

Abstract

This book develops the implications of that venerable Aristotelian notion of justice for understanding contemporary private law. Over the last decades corrective justice has become a central but controversial idea among legal scholars and theorists. This book presents corrective justice as the normative idea latent in the institutions and concepts of a fair and coherent regime of liability. It begins by setting out the conceptual components of corrective justice: the correlativity of the parties normative positions as the structuring idea of their relationship, and a robust notion of rights and their correlative duties (conceived in Kantian terms) as the content appropriate to legal relationships structured in that way. It then describes the significance of corrective justice for various legal contexts: for the grounds of liability in negligence, contract and unjust enrichment; for the relationship between right and remedy; for legal education; for the comparative understanding of private law; and for the compatibility of corrective justice with state support for the poor. The book integrates the concrete and wide-ranging treatment of legal doctrine with a unitary and comprehensive set of theoretical ideas. Combining legal and philosophical analysis, it presents private law in non-instrumental terms, as a distinctive mode of moral discourse that focuses on the normativity intrinsic to the parties relationship.

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