Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices

"Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices is the first comprehensive account of remedial law's scope, foundations, and structure. A remedy, it argues, is a judicial ruling, and remedial law is the body of rules governing the availability and content of remedies. Focussing on rulings that are intended to resolve private law disputes (for example, awards of damages, injunctions, and restitutionary orders), this book explains why remedial law is distinctive, how it relates to substantive law, and what its foundational principles are. Drawing on doctrinal, historical, and philosophical sources, it advances four main arguments. First, the question of what courts should do when individuals seek their assistance (the focus of remedial law) is different from the question of how individuals should treat one another in their day-to-day lives (the focus of substantive law). Second, remedies provide distinctive reasons to perform the actions they command; in particular, they provide reasons different from those provided by either rules or sanctions. Third, remedial law has a complex relationship to substantive law. Some remedies are responses to rights-threats, others to wrongs, and yet others to injust