ABSTRACT
At private law the sufferers of wrongful harm can recover compensation from those who have wronged them. Such litigation reflects deeply embedded intuitions about justice and personal responsibility. Yet among legal scholars, the nature of private law remains controversial. Justice, both corrective and distributive, involves the achievement of to is not which in Greek signifies both fairness and equality. In Aristotle's account, fairness as a norm is inseparable from equality as a mathematical function. The idea of equality allows Aristotle to describe justice in holdings as mathematical operations. Justice functions for holdings as equality functions for mathematical terms. The bipolarity of corrective justice is also evident in its conception of interaction. Aristotle repeatedly describes the two parties to corrective justice as being active and passive with respect to each other. Empirical classification observes the physical or social world upon which justice operates and cuts that world into different slices.
