Justice in Contract, no Justice in the Background

Abstract

In the first part of his book, Peter Benson elaborates for the common law that fairness in exchange is not only a fundamental principle of contract law, but that it is, moreover, conceptually rooted in the idea of private autonomy. For the common law presumes that a party to a contract intends, in principle, to exchange performance at its value and on fair terms. The following comment shows that this presumption also animates German contract law, including the rules on the review of standard terms. In the second part, Benson develops the image of a harmonious complementarity of private law, which is characterised by transactional justice, and public law, which instantiates distributive justice. The following comment disputes the claimed harmony by demonstrating the fundamental asymmetry in the institutionalisation of both forms of justice in civil society.