Abstract:
According to Aristotle, justice consists of giving each person his due: equal members of society should be treated equally, and unequal members, unequally. This justice, in turn, comes in two flavors: distributive and corrective. Distributive justice – which has as its purview society at large – is concerned with distributing society’s shares to individuals according to merit. Whereas, the purview of corrective justice concerns voluntary (eg, contracts) and involuntary (eg, torts) transactions, and it seeks to rectify unjust alterations in the distributive scheme by returning the parties to the position they occupied before the distributive scheme was altered, which is to say, before a particular harm occurred. Even today, Aristotle’s classification of these two types of justice holds a firm grip on the judicial imagination, and perhaps nowhere is this truer than in contract law …
Jimenez, Marco, Distributive Justice and Contract Law: A Hohfeldian Analysis (September 7, 2017). Florida State University Law Review, volume 43, no 1265, 2016.
First posted 2017-09-12 06:10:49
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