Relational Justice

Hanoch Dagan is the founding Director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. Dagan has written seven books, including A Liberal Theory of Property (2021) and The Choice Theory of Contracts (2017), and has published over 120 articles in major law reviews and journals. 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 a professor at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. He works in the theoretical foundations of law. He has written numerous articles on a variety of basic questions in private law theory and doctrine as well as on the morality of public ordering, including privatization, public property, and political authority. 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 Law School and Cornell Law School.

• Part I Introduction 1: The Law of Just Relationships Part II Foundations 2: Private Law 3: Relational Justice 4: Justice in Private Law Part III The Familiar Terrain 5: Negligence and the Reasonable Person 6: Nonfeasance Liability 7: Substantive Remedies 8: Public Nuisance 9: Precontractual Justice 10: Good Faith and Related Doctrines 11: Restitution Part IV Beyond The Familiar 12: Regulating Workplace Safety 13: The Tort of Discrimination 14: Poverty 15: Beyond Borders Part V Conclusion 16: The Promise of Private Law

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.