Corrective Justice for Moderns

Legal Theory, 2006

This paper questions the fairness of our current tort-law regime and the philosophical underpinnings advanced in its defense, a theory known as corrective justice. Fairness requires that the moral equality and responsibility of persons be respected in social interactions and institutions. The concept of luck has been used by many egalitarians as a way of giving content to fairness by differentiating between those benefits and burdens that result from informed choice and those that result from fate or fortune. We argue that the theory of corrective justice, along with its institutional embodiment of tort law, is at odds with an egalitarian commitment to fairness because it allows luck an unjustifiable role in determining dissimilar liability for similar wrongs and dissimilar compensation for similar losses to bodily integrity. Many egalitarian political theorists have also recognized, if not defended, the notion of distinct forms of justice, namely corrective, retributive, and distri...

2018

2003

Abstract: This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality.

2016

This paper comments on Ronen Avraham & Kim Yuracko, Torts and Discrimination forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal. Professors Avraham and Yuracko’s fine article, Torts and Discrimination, calls our attention to the fact that the entrenched fact of race and gender discrimination exerts a powerful, structural influence on tort damages, especially in bodily injury and wrongful death cases. Damages in tort — and in private law more generally — are reparative. Their role is to put the plaintiff in the position he would have been in but for the defendant’s wrong. Making the plaintiff whole requires that courts determine how the plaintiff’s life would have gone had she not been wrongly harmed. State of the art methods for doing incorporate the effects of objectionable racial and gender discrimination and carry those effects forward. The life expectancy, work-life expectancy, and average wage tables are tailored to the circumstances of men and Caucasians, the more they reflect the lega...

37 Washburn L.J. 249, 1998

2016

The late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century US economy maimed and killed employees at an astronomically high rate, while the legal system left the injured and their loved ones with little recourse. In the 1910s, US states enacted workers' compensation laws, which required employers to pay a portion of the financial costs of workplace injuries. Nate Holdren uses a range of archival materials, interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, and compelling narration to criticize the shortcomings of these laws. While compensation laws were a limited improvement for employees in economic terms, Holdren argues that these laws created new forms of inequality, causing people with disabilities to lose their jobs, while also resulting in new forms of inhumanity. Ultimately, this study raises questions about law and class and about when and whether our economy and our legal system produce justice or injustice.

2012

2015

Most of the time people look to the law for justice. The demand for justice is made in the form of a legal or moral claim. A person accused of a crime claims the right to fair trial or procedural justice. People’s demand for punishment of a criminal act is a demand for justice. A citizen’s claim to equality before the law is a claim of justice. Justice is not exclusively a jurist’s concern. It is at the center of moral and social philosophy. Justice has been termed as the highest virtue. It has also been equated with fairness. The concept of just entitlement is also central to the theme of justice. A person who is fair, generous and helpful engages in the virtue of beneficence. Sympathy is the origin of the ideas of beneficence and of justice. The most recent idea of justice puts emphasis on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. The aim of this paper is to evaluate various paradigms of the concept of justice and to highlight how the ideal of ...