Private Law Theory

A recent judgement of the court involving the manager of a football club has sparked a lot of public interest and criticism. The court held that the manager, Alex Ferg could not hold a maintainable suit against the defendants as it involved multiple pharmaceutical companies. The works of Ernest Weinrib, a law professor at University of Toronto who developed the theories of private law were cited.

Private law is an area of law which deals with private relationships between individuals including torts, contracts and restitution. Private law theorists believe that all of private law can be justified by ‘corrective justice’. Corrective justice is a concept which was introduced by Aristotle that deals with correlativity of both the plaintiff and

It overlooks various scenarios in which more than one wrongdoer exist. This is a shortcoming of corrective justice which proposes that tort law is only a matter of rectification of losses wrongfully inflicted by only one defendant. In fact, the main purpose of tort law and private law theory is providing compensation for the wrongs done towards the plaintiff regardless of the number of defendants. When the main aspect of private law theory is providing compensation and justice to the plaintiff, it cannot be denied only because one aspect of private law theory is not applicable to it. The judge neglects so many other aspects of the theory and interprets corrective justice in a very literal sense. Applying the law word to word is a very redundant and regressive way of looking at the law. In complex cases such as these, laws must be interpreted in purposive way so that there is no wrongful gain for the defendants. The judge only looks at cases in which a bipolar relationship and a harm and wrong are clearly identifiable, while forgetting about a whole range of cases in which these concepts are ambiguous, although are

We cannot apply a theory universally to all the cases we come across. There will always be a great multitude of cases in which the fact situations are complex, and the laws cannot be applied directly. The corrective justice approach has a shortcoming when multiple defendants are involved and thus cannot be used so rigidly in some private law cases. The other aspects of private law which are more crucial should be applied instead. Justice is attained only when each case is looked at individually and laws are applied accordingly, so that a sense of fairness is maintained in our