Are There Private Law Duties to Accommodate the Poor? A Comment on Relational Justice

In Relational Justice, Dagan and his co-author Avihay Dorfman argue that the aim of private law is and ought to be to structure (a subset of) our interpersonal relationships to facilitate our self-determination and substantive equality. Unlike more traditionalist interpretations, they argue that the relational justice view can make sense of the existence of important positive duties within private law. The theory of relational justice postulates duties of accommodation to attend to another’s vulnerability in our private interpersonal interactions. The relational justice view argues that these aspects of doctrine exist because the fundamental purpose of private law is to shape and support people’s ability to relate to one another as free and equal. Dagan and Dorfman claim that the basic rights that make up the domain of private law are grounded on two fundamental commitments: to self-determination and substantive equality. Self-determination is a person’s ability to make meaningful choices about the direction of their life.