Abstract

This article outlines the thesis that egalitarian liberalism (EL) may require certain structural features of private law (PL). These characteristics would be necessary if egalitarian liberal institutions were to remain sensitive to what Nagel (1991) refers to as a personal point of view. Even if the basic freedoms that EL treats as priorities are parsimonious in relation to property and that institutional conformity to one or more principles of distributive justice (what the article calls “egalitarian demand”) threatens to “disfigure it”, PL would maintain, under EL, a non-contingent status. Regarding method, the article is characterized as an “internal” investigation of EL, which accepts some of its basic premises (such as the priority of basic freedoms and distributive justice) to deal with the place of private law in this tradition.

Keywords:
Private Law; Liberal Egalitarianism; Distributive Justice