The Ambition of Public Justification in Contract

This review of Peter Benson's Justice in Transactions focuses on the book's attempt to combine the juridical vision of contract with contract's social role in providing a coherent framework for market relations. The combination is challenging because the juridical conception ignores particular interests, needs, purposes, and preferences of contracting parties, while the market is precisely a system for satisfying needs or obtaining substantive satisfactions. The review suggests that Benson's treatment of the combination is open to two readings: one reading claims that contract as we know it actually succeeds in achieving public justification; the other reading claims that contract could potentially be a justified institution, but only if the background regime of rights was transformed so that juridical and substantive equality were more closely aligned.