Contract Law and Reasons of Social Justice

Abstract

The view that contract law should do social justice deserves closer and more charitable attention than it has been given in theoretical debates. In particular, resistance to that view is often due to misunderstandings about the nature of social justice and the interests it protects; the kind of impact that contract law can make on the social structure and the demands that this would involve for individual transacting agents, and; the relation between structure-sensitive and structure-insensitive principles for the enforcement of voluntary transactions. Once these misunderstandings are dealt with, taking contract law to aim for social justice seems a no less plausible or attractive a view than most other grand normative theories of contract.