In The Foundations of Private Law James Gordley argues that the modern private law in common and civil law jurisdictions is best explained on the basis of a neo-Aristotelian theory first developed by a group of 16th century Spanish thinkers known as the ‘late scholastics’. The concepts of distributive and commutative justice that, according to Gordley, lay at core of the scholastics’ theory and that explain, respectively, modern property law and the law of obligations (contract, tort, unjust enrichment), though ignored and disparaged for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, are today familiar to most private law scholars (thanks in part to Gordley’s earlier work). Yet Gordley’s understanding of these concepts and, in particular, of their relationship both to one another and to the apex idea of ‘living a distinctively human life’ is unique, setting his account apart not just from utilitarian and other ‘modern’ accounts of private law, but also from other neo-Aristotelian theories (e.g., those of Ernest Weinrib or Jules Coleman). In Gordley’s presentation, commutative (or ‘corrective’) justice is derived from distributive justice and distributive justice is derived from the idea of the distinctively human life. Confidently traversing a wide range of historical, comparative and theoretical materials, the book’s argument is at once ambitious, learned, and elegantly presented. But as a theoretical account of the foundations of the modern private law it is unpersuasive. The book’s own account of property law suggests that in practice the idea of distributive justice does little, if any, work in explaining the rules we actually have. Nor is it clear how, if at all, distributive justice flows from the allegedly foundational idea of the ’distinctively human life’. As for commutative justice, it is not clear why, if is derived from distributive justice in the way Gordley believes, the courts should care about it. Finally, but perhaps most significantly, Gordley’s conception of commutative justice is unable to account for central features of the law of obligations.
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