ABSTRACT
Most legal scholars, lawyers, and members of the public traditionally have assumed that law in general, and liability rules in particular, are and should be based on principles of justice. Yet the principles of justice that are assumed to underlie the law have received very little elaboration. During the last decade, Ernest Weinrib mounted an increasingly strong attack against instrumental conceptions of law and justice. For Weinrib, private law is the adjudication of private disputes and public law is the judicially enforceable limitations on the legislative and administrative direction of the community. Weinrib agrees that normative premises are implicated in Aristotle's linking of the concepts of "arithmetical" and "geometrical" equality with the concepts of immediate and mediated relations in corrective justice and distributive justice, respectively. Coleman claims to have seen the light. He acknowledges that the annulment thesis is, at best, a conception of distributive justice rather than corrective justice.
