The Distributive Foundation of Corrective Justice

Abstract

Corrective justice accounts resist any reduction of private law into another mode of regulation. They also seek to preserve private law in isolation from broader social values. This Essay refutes the latter claim while celebrating the former. It claims that the separation of private law from social values is impossible; that beneath the premise of corrective justice there is an inevitable distributive foundation. Nonetheless, it encourages theorists of the social values school to take the distinctiveness of private law, being a forum for reallocating resources between two private citizens, seriously. Having the law governing unilateral appropriations as its contextual setting, this Essay demonstrates the fallacy of "private law exceptionalism," the importance of an open distributive analysis of private law, and the compatibility of a distributive account of private law with an appreciation of the distinctive features of private law.