Rethinking relational architecture: Interpersonal justice beyond private law

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point a particular idea about the nature of private law: that it is specially concerned with relational or interpersonal justice. The relational conception is meant to be juxtaposed against non-relational conceptions typically grouped under the heading of ‘instrumentalism’: the idea that law is a means to an end. But a question mark hovers over domains beyond the private. Are these non-relational or relational and anti-instrumentalist in different ways? To answer this question, this article articulates a more capacious framework of interpersonal justice that captures the continuities and discontinuities between private law and non-private fields. I rework the architectonic of relationality, untangling foundational concepts such as the notions of parties and identities; the process of reasoning to different structures of interpersonal obligations; and the multifaceted idea of instrumentalism. Working through moral philosophy, jurisprudence, criminal law, and constitutional and administrative law, I follow the golden thread of interpersonal justice that is woven through the conceptual architecture of all these fields and suggest further consolidations, extensions, and implications that are yet to be fully grasped.