Principled Pluralism and Contract Remedies

Abstract

Contemporary justifications for the expectation measure of contract damages come primarily from two meta-ethical schools: autonomy and utility. Autonomy and utility are incommensurable and thus far efforts to combine or order them have not proven successful. This article presents a unitary justification of autonomy and utility by appealing to a transcendent order. Given the modern pluralistic, secular legal order, I anticipate and address concerns about the legitimacy of my proposed justification.

Keywords: contracts, remedies, autonomy, utility