Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law

What makes private law private? What is its domain? What are the values it promotes? Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law addresses these foundational questions in a robust analysis of the key doctrines of private law, including torts, contracts, and restitution.

Discarding the vision of private law as a bastion of negative duties of non-interference or efficiency maximization, this book reframes private law in terms of what it calls ’relational justice’ - reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. By vindicating self-determination, private law can forge the horizontal interactions vital to the ability to shape and implement a conception of the good life. By structuring these interactions in terms requiring parties to respect one another for who they are, private law can cast them as interactions between equals.

In the book’s first part, the authors set out a normative position they term relational justice, whereby the rules of private law abide by the fundamental maxim of reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. The second part of the book applies this framework to an analysis of familiar private law doctrinal areas, followed by a third part charting newer areas including workplace safety, poverty, discrimination, and implications for international law. Throughout, the authors show how relational justice theory provides a normative vocabulary for evaluating core features of existing private law, while suggesting directions for necessary or desirable reforms.

Hanoch Dagan, Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director, Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory, Avihay Dorfman, Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University

Hanoch Dagan is the founding Director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory and Stewart and Judy Colton Emeritus Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation at Tel Aviv University. Dagan has written seven books, including A Liberal Theory of Property (2021) and The Choice Theory of Contracts (2017), and has published over 120 articles in major law reviews and journals. Before joining Berkeley, Dagan was the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University. He has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, and Toronto, and delivered keynote speeches and endowed lectures in Singapore, Alabama, Toronto, Queensland, Cape Town, Monash, and Oxford.

Avihay Dorfman is a professor at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. He works in the theoretical foundations of law. He has written numerous articles on a variety of basic questions in private law theory and doctrine as well as on the morality of public ordering, including privatization, public property, and political authority. Dorfman is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk to the (then) Chief Justice Aharon Barak. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Cornell Law School.