The Constitutive Demands of Corrective Justice

Abstract

Ernest Weinrib’s recent book, Reciprocal Freedom, considers the implications of his Kantian corrective justice account of private law for other aspects of the legal order (including distributive justice, constitutional rights and the rule of law). The book addresses an important ambiguity left open in Weinrib’s past work: whether corrective justice places any limits on the substance of what can count as private law (what Kant calls ‘constitutive’ requirements). At first, Weinrib appears to deny this, implying that corrective justice is merely ‘regulative’—that it helps judges interpret private law in a way that is more coherent and just, without excluding any particular legal content. But a closer reading reveals that he accepts such limits: private law that violates the innate right of persons is non-authoritative. This reading changes our understanding of Weinrib’s work, and requires us to consider whether Weinrib can still claim to have a positivist account of law.