Abstract

This article deals with the place of private law in the theories of justice of John Rawls and Rainer Forst. In relation to the first, it is argued, against the idea of a strict institutional division of labor, that private law (more precisely, the broad contours of the private law regime) can be part of the institutions that decisively impact on the expectations of citizens as to the distribution of primary goods and which must, therefore, conform to the conception of justice (justice as fairness) which, according to Rawls, would be chosen in the original position. In the final sections, the implications of Rawls’s theory of justice for private law are contrasted with Rainer Forst’s conception of justice as the right of justification. In these sections, it is argued that justice as a right of justification makes up for a deliberative deficit of the Rawlsian conception of justice and subjects private law to demands other than those arising from distributive justice.

Private law; justice; justice as fairness; right to justification; Rawls; Forst