ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Immanuel Kant's account of the nature and significance of private ordering in relation to freedom. It utilises this Kantian idea of private ordering to explain the place of private law in what John Rawls has described as the "division of responsibility" between society and the individual. John Locke's invocation of the concept of tacit consent blunts some of the force of this equivalence, but the structure of the strategy is clear: only private ordering is consistent with freedom. The Lockean strategy collapses public justice into private law by denying the normative significance of the most significantly obvious public aspect of private right, the resolution of disputes through public procedures for applying antecedently articulated laws governing all citizens—in short, the rule of law. The chapter is concerned with showing why private ordering requires public justice. It argues that private law is only a system of reciprocal limits on freedom, provided that those limits are general in the right way.
