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.

‍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.