What makes private law private? What is its domain, and the values it promotes? In a new book, Professor Hanoch Dagan and co-author Avihay Dorfman build on years of their scholarship to lay out a new approach to understanding some of society’s most important touchstones.
Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law argues that private law should, and to a significant degree already does, abide by two fundamental commitments: reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. That’s the core of what Dagan and Dorfman call “relational justice.” In identifying the features of their theory and outlining its guidelines, the authors also explain their opposition to the dominant schools of private law theory, whether they take the private law category seriously or marginalize its significance.
“Our liberal theory of private law does not provide a set of blueprints or a detailed description of prevailing doctrines in a specific jurisdiction,” Dagan and Dorfman write. “It aims to offer a framework for the critical study of private law that can guide its interpretation, development, and reform, a significant undertaking given that private law is indispensable and public law, even in its most generous and liberal version, does not suffice.”
Relational Justice is the eighth book for Dagan, who’s the founding director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory and has written more than 130 scholarly articles. It’s drawing rave reviews: Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits calls it “hugely creative and ambitious,” while University of Muenster Professor Thomas Gutmann says it’s “the best book we have, not just on the distinctive significance and core intellectual principles of private law, but on its heart and soul.”