Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law

Hanoch Dagan is the Elizabeth J. Boalt Distinguished Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. Dagan has written eight books, including The Choice Theory of Contracts (2017), A Liberal Theory of Property (2021), and Advanced Introduction to Private Law Theory (2026), and has published over 140 articles in major law reviews and journals. He edited six books, including Research Handbook on Private Law Theory (2020) (with Benjamin Zipursky). 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 “The Friends of Joe Jamail” Regents Chair in Law and Founding Academic Director of the Private Law Theory Program at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Dorfman is the author of Reclaiming the Public (2024) and, most recently, Conflict between Equals: Tort Law beyond Wrong, Harm, and Cost (2026). His work focuses on the conceptual and normative foundations of law. He has written on fundamental questions in private law theory and doctrine as well as on the morality of public ordering, including privatization, public property, institutional pluralism, and political authority. Before joining Texas, Dorfman was a law professor at Tel Aviv University. 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 and Cornell.

Review from previous edition Relational Justice proposes a wholesale renovation of private law. Familiar theories remain caught between two equal but opposite vices: a quietist commitment to restoring the status quo; and flat-footed reduction of private law into a tool of public justice. Now Dagan and Dorfman argue that law should help people to establish reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality, one private relationship at a time. They then apply this overarching insight to reconstruct all of private law doctrine, across both conventional topics—including remedies, negligence, and good faith—and unconventional ones—including poverty, discrimination, and even workplace safety. This is a hugely creative and ambitious book.