Corrective Justice


Book Description

Private law governs our most pervasive relationships: the wrongs we do one another, the contracts we make and break, and the property we own. This book analyses the deepest questions about the law's foundations, showing how a distinctive notion of justice, 'corrective justice', describes the special morality intrinsic to private law.




Apologies and Moral Repair


Book Description

This book argues that justice often governs apologies. Drawing on examples from literature, politics, and current events, Cohen presents a theory of apology as corrective offers. Many leading accounts of apology say much about what apologies do and why they are important. They stop short of exploring whether and how justice governs apologies. Cohen argues that corrective justice may require apologies as offers of reparation. Individuals, corporations, and states may then have rights or duties regarding apology. Exercising rights to apology or fulfilling duties to provide them are ways of holding one another mutually accountable. By casting rights and duties of apology as justifiable to free and equal persons, the book advances conversations about how liberalism may respond to historic injustice. Apologies and Moral Repair will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in ethics, political philosophy, and social philosophy.




Corrective and Distributive Justice


Book Description

Corrective and Distributive Justice: From Aristotle to Modern Times retraces the intricate history of the distinction between corrective and distributive justice. This distinction is elaborated in the 5th book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which was rediscovered in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries by the Scholastics and turned into a central topic in legal and theological scholarship. After a decline of interest in the wake of the enlightenment and secularization, a surprising revival of these notions of justice occurred in U.S. legal and philosophical discourse during the last four decades that has made this distinction a central issue in tort law, restitution and other important fields of private and public law. In literally hundreds of articles and a considerable number of books, the Aristotelian distinction has been elaborated, discussed, and applied. Englard's unique contribution to this aspect of legal history grants the contemporary reader a historical perspective that is vital for a deepened understanding of the distinction and modern concerns. Organized chronologically, Englard's research covers: Aristotle, High Scholastics, Late Scholastics, Post-Scholastics, and Modernity. The relevant literature is notoriously difficult to access, not only because of its Latin language, but because of the physical rarity of the relevant books scattered throughout the world. This book offers the modern reader a touchstone synthesis of intellectual and legal history.




Risks and Wrongs


Book Description

Jules Coleman discusses the conflict between the goals of justice and economic efficiency in the allocation of risk, especially risk pertaining to safety.




The Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law promises to help redefine and reinvigorate the subject of private law, a domain that includes property, contract, and tort law, as well as intellectual property, unjust enrichment, and equity. It emphasizes cross-cutting perspectives and relations between areas of private law, with special attention to the doctrines and structures of the law-an approach now known as "the New Private Law." This perspective includes explanation, justification, and criticism of existing law, reflecting the conviction of the editors that it makes sense to know what the law is in order to be in a position to criticize and reform it. The Handbook will be an essential resource for legal scholars interested in the future of this important field.




Recognizing Wrongs


Book Description

Two preeminent legal scholars explain what tort law is all about and why it matters, and describe their own view of tort’s philosophical basis: civil recourse theory. Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly. Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.




A Brief History of Justice


Book Description

A Brief History of Justice traces the development of the idea of justice from the ancient world until the present day, with special attention to the emergence of the modern idea of social justice. An accessible introduction to the history of ideas about justice Shows how complex ideas are anchored in ordinary intuitions about justice Traces the emergence of the idea of social justice Identifies connections as well as differences between distributive and corrective justice Offers accessible, concise introductions to the thought of several leading figures and schools of thought in the history of philosophy




Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice


Book Description

The purpose of this volume is to rethink the questions posed by Derrida's writings and his unique philosophical positioning, without reference to the catch phrases that have supposedly summed up deconstruction.




The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice


Book Description

Many countries have attempted to transition to democracy following conflict or repression, but the basic meaning of transitional justice remains hotly contested. In this book, Colleen Murphy analyses transitional justice - showing how it is distinguished from retributive, corrective, and distributive justice - and outlines the ethical standards which societies attempting to democratize should follow. She argues that transitional justice involves the just pursuit of societal transformation. Such transformation requires political reconciliation, which in turn has a complex set of institutional and interpersonal requirements including the rule of law. She shows how societal transformation is also influenced by the moral claims of victims and the demands of perpetrators, and how justice processes can fail to be just by failing to foster this transformation or by not treating victims and perpetrators fairly. Her book will be accessible and enlightening for philosophers, political and social scientists, policy analysts, and legal and human rights scholars and activists.




Legal Directives and Practical Reasons


Book Description

This book investigates law's interaction with practical reasons. What difference can legal requirements-e.g. traffic rules, tax laws, or work safety regulations-make to normative reasons relevant to our action? Do they give reasons for action that should be weighed among all other reasons? Or can they, instead, exclude and take the place of some other reasons? The book critically examines some of the existing answers and puts forward an alternative understanding of law's interaction with practical reasons. At the outset, two competing positions are pitted against each other: Joseph Raz's view that (legitimate) legal authorities have pre-emptive force, namely that they give reasons for action that exclude some other reasons; and an antithesis, according to which law-making institutions (even those that meet prerequisites of legitimacy) can at most provide us with reasons that compete in weight with opposing reasons for action. These two positions are examined from several perspectives, such as justified disobedience cases, law's conduct-guiding function in contexts of bounded rationality, and the phenomenology associated with authority. It is found that, although each of the above positions offers insight into the conundrum at hand, both suffer from significant flaws. These observations form the basis on which an alternative position is put forward and defended. According to this position, the existence of a reasonably just and well-functioning legal system constitutes a reason that fits neither into a model of ordinary reasons for action nor into a pre-emptive paradigm-it constitutes a reason to adopt an (overridable) disposition that inclines its possessor towards compliance with the system's requirements.