Book Review of: Stephen A. Smith, Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices: The Structure of Remedial Law (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Final version subsequently published in 79 Cambridge Law Journal 615 (2020)
7 Pages Posted: 21 Jun 2021
Date Written: June 10, 2021
Abstract
This paper is a draft review of Stephen Smith’s recent book -- Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices: The Structure of Remedial Law (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book offers a groundbreaking and deeply insightful theory of the remedies in private law. On Smith’s account, remedies are judicial rulings, and they are issued because they provide people with new reasons for action. This review will focus on a jurisprudential puzzle that lies at the center of the book. Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices provides an original account of the authority in court orders. I will suggest that the book is right that the authority in court orders is distinctive, but wrong in its analysis of what grounds that authority. Considering this question, however, sheds significant new light on the law of remedies and on private law as a whole.
Keywords: private law, remedies, authority, court orders, wrongs
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation