Private (Law) Egalitarianism

‍Private law, with its focus on interpersonal rights, is often thought to have an inherently libertarian bent. This is not to say that it necessarily yields libertarian conclusions; still, if we wish to avoid these, we must introduce considerations (of distributive justice, say) that are in some important sense external to the relations among private persons central to private law. Or so it is often assumed. It is one of the distinctive virtues of Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman’s book, Relational Justice, that it puts pressure on this proto-libertarian assumption about private law, by articulating an alternative interpretation of the interpersonal normativity underpinning private law—one that is centered on the eponymous ideal of relational justice and its egalitarian commitments. It is this feature of Dagan and Dorfman’s book—their account of the egalitarian commitments that are internal to private relations, and their implications for what private law is and ought to be—that is the focus of this brief essay.