The law enables private parties to undo the wrongs committed against them. In other words, the law enables victims to seek redress. This book shows how a distinctive kind of justice governs our legal rights of redress, different from the leading corrective justice approaches. In the process, it helps to make sense of tort, contract, fiduciary law, and unjust enrichment doctrine. As developed in The Right of Redress, when a wrong is remedied, the authorship of that remedy matters. The justice in private law is sensitive to a right holder’s authorship, and understanding how solves a number of legal theory puzzles. This book also offers a novel account of the state’s obligations. Many forms of redress are only available with state assistance, and a full account of private law requires an account of the state’s responsibility to assist. It also requires an explanation of those cases in which the state declines to assist. Prior accounts have drawn on Kantian principles or a Lockean social contract theory. Drawing on public fiduciary theory, The Right of Redress develops a distinctive account of the state’s role. Lastly, this book offers a new take on various modern features of the private law landscape, ranging from equity, to damage caps, to arbitration, to corporate claims, to class actions. The Right of Redress thus offers a path-breaking account of the justice in private law, of the political theory that underlies it, and of the contemporary features that shape our rights of redress today.
Challenging the Right of Exit ‘Remedy’ in the Political Theory of Cultural Diversity