This paper defends the heretical view that, at least in some cases, we ought to assign legal liability based on purely statistical evidence. The argument draws on prominent civil law litigation concerning pharmaceutical negligence and asbestos-poisoning. The overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls that result from supposing that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.

Freedom of contract and corrective justice are considered to be the basic principles governing contract law. However, many contemporary legal orders implement various policy goals into private law. The regulatory private law of the European Union is the most striking example of such a trend. This article aims at reconciling the corrective justice theory of private law and the principle of freedom of contract with the regulatory dimension of the EU law. The main argument is that the meaning of the (...) concept of harm, one that is crucial to the principle of corrective justice, should be understood broadly so that it can transform the corrective justice theory from a monistic one into a pluralistic one. (shrink)

In this paper I show that penalties are not prices, and explain why the difference matters. In section one, I set up the problem which the following two sections will solve: namely, that it is easy enough to make certain kinds of penalties look just like prices. In section two, I lay out and dismantle an argument for reducing the former to the latter; and in section three I dismantle an argument for taking penalties and prices to be pragmatically equivalent, (...) on the grounds that the essential function of both is to attach costs to actions. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask how – and whether – the rectification of injury at which corrective justice aims is possible, and by whom it must be performed. I split the injury up into components of harm and wrong, and consider their rectification separately. First, I show that pecuniary compensation for the harm is practically plausible, because money acts as a mediator between the damaged interest and other interests. I then argue that this is also a morally plausible approach, because (...) it does not claim too much for compensation: neither can all harms be compensated, nor can it be said when compensation is paid that the status quo ante has been restored. I argue that there is no conceptual reason for any particular agent paying this compensation. I then turn to the wrong, and reject three proposed methods of rectification. The first aims to rectify the wrong by rectifying the harm; the second deploys punitive damages; the third, punishment. After undermining each proposal, I argue that the wrong can only be rectified by a full apology, which I disaggregate into the admission of causal and moral responsibility, repudiation of the act, reform, and, in some cases, disgorgement and reparations, which I define as a good faith effort to share the burden of the victim’s harm. I argue, further, that only the injurer herself can make a full apology, and it is not something that can be coerced by other members of society. As such, whether rectification of the wrong can be a matter of corrective justice is left an open question. (shrink)

The debate concerning solidarity and justice among states has missed the key contribution made to international affairs by corrective justice. Unlike distributive justice, which applies within states, corrective justice applies among states. It applies in particular to cooperative arrangements creating interdependence among them. Corrective justice does not require fairness in outcomes. It requires redress in cases of loss caused by unfairness. An illustration of corrective justice among states is the Eurozone’s response to the financial crisis. The assistance offered to the (...) most burdened states was not as an attempt to arrive at fair shares but an attempt to remedy the losses unfairly caused by the mistakes made by the Eurozone as a whole, when designing its basic architecture. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend fairness-based retributivism against two important objections, the no-benefit objection and the social injustice objection. I argue that the theory can defeat the no-benefit objection by developing an account of how crimes can be sources of unfairness by inflicting losses on people, and that it can blunt the social injustice objection by toning down the theory’s distributive aspirations. I conclude that fairness-based retributivism, contrary to received wisdom, merits further attention from legal and political philosophers.

La filosofía jurídico-política kantiana es —desde hace varios años— protagonista de primer nivel en los debates sobre la justicia, la propiedad y la pobreza. El renacimiento vino de la mano del trabajo de varios filósofos y juristas que, afortunadamente, se apartan de los incómodos y desacertados apodos que recibió Kant en la segunda mitad del siglo pasado: “Kant el político moralista”, “Kant liberal”, “Kant, el defensor de la propiedad privada exclusiva y excluyente”. Ha vuelto ahora con renovado y creciente interés, (...) el “Kant republicano”, luego de casi dos siglos de olvidos. No pretendo realizar una reseña de la abundante bibliografía de uno y otro período interpretativo —el del Kant liberal y el del Kant republicano—; el objetivo principal de este trabajo es recuperar algunas piezas del Kant republicano de la mano de la tradición republicana histórica que se inicia con Aristóteles y reaparece, con fuerza renovada, en algunos representantes modernos del derecho natural, siendo Kant uno de ellos. Comenzaré con una reseña acerca de lo que juzgo como la interpretación contemporánea más influyente sobre la justicia en Kant, la de John Rawls; para luego apuntar algunas tesis sobre el valor de la concepción kantiana de la justicia pública, entendida como el imprescindible correlato institucional del derecho a la libertad innata, el único derecho natural inalienable. (shrink)