Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman believe that theoretical work on private law has become too polarized. Close There is plenty of habitable space between the two poles.
In Just Relationships , they locate, and recommend, one possible intermediate position. I have myself complained about, and sought to escape, the strange polarization of theoretical work on private law. Close I agree with Dagan and Dorfman, moreover, that private law is morally distinctive even though it cannot avoid being implicated in politics.
Part 2. Close And while I differ on some points that need not detain us here, I also share their wider liberal outlook on life, and hence many of their concrete judgments on how the law ought to deal with various problems. So we have much in common. Close If anything, the reverse is true. Close or vanilla case of law as an instrument of public policy, and public law is in large part a specialized adaptation of it. They do not see the radical potential of their own liberal ideals as correctives for those misconceptions.
It is unlikely that a short response such as this could spell out these claims satisfactorily, never mind bear them out. To recapitulate and abbreviate, they are a noninstrumentality, b indispensability, c relationality, and d value-specificity. It may make you think that Dagan and Dorfman see the intrinsic value of private law as entirely unconditional, as holding whatever else may hold. Close it seems they do not really see it that way. Close to which it contributes. Close but wisely, they do not say that it is sufficient.
Close This shows that the reference to contingency by Dagan and Dorfman is a red herring. Intrinsic value is not the same as noncontingent value. Dagan and Dorfman do not make it easy to do so.
