Corrective Justice Beyond Private Law

This chapter articulates and defends a republican interpretation of corrective justice theory. This view takes “independence” as the constitutive aim of a legal system but understands independence in a substantive and not merely formal way. Developing Kant’s conception of substantive independence as an ideal of equal citizens working together, this chapter argues that corrective justice requires accounting for the role that private legal entitlements play in causing and upholding forms of subordinating dependence that arise from our interdependent participation in a productive economy around work, housing, education, and public accommodation. It outlines an approach to defining the scope of private entitlements and a doctrine of exploitation consistent with corrective justice. Independence points to a non-distributive approach to justice that retains the core ideas of relationality and correlativity at the heart of private law. This alternative approach incorporates many of the considerations associated with public law and distributive justice while remaining within a corrective justice framework.