Law of Obligations

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.

This book offers a new approach to understanding private law. Rejecting the functionalism popular among legal scholars, the book advances the idea that private law is an autonomous and non-instrumental moral practice, with its own structure and rationality. The book draws on Aristotle's account of corrective justice and Kant's legal philosophy to set out a formalist approach to private law that repudiates the identification of law with politics or economics. It argues that private law is to be understood as a juridical enterprise in which coherent public reason elaborates the norms implicit in the parties' interaction. Private law embodies a special morality that links the doer and the sufferer of injury. The book elucidates the standpoint internal to this morality and traces the implications of the formalism he proposes for our ideas of the structure, coherence, and normative grounding of private law. It also shows how this formalism manifests itself in the leading doctrines of private law. Finally, the book describes the public but non-political role of the courts in articulating the special morality of private law.