Private Law and Kantian Right

In The Idea of Private Law, Ernest Weinrib sought to rescue private law's autonomy from functionalism's reduction of private law to an instrument of the public interest. The twin ideas he employed for this purpose were corrective justice and Kantian Right. According to Weinrib, corrective justice provides private law's unifying structure, while Kantian Right supplies its normative content. In this essay, I argue that Kantian Right cannot be the normative complement to the correctivejustice form of private law because, with the exception of trespass to the person, private law vanishes in Kantian Right. I argue that there is no possibility for an autonomous private law in Kantian Right and that there is, indeed, a logical progression from Kantian Right to the very functionalism that Weinrib opposes.