How Liberal is Relational Justice?

Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman offer a compelling new liberal account of private law that takes seriously the liberal commitment to self-determination. Their theory takes an illiberal turn, however, by aiming to regulate private relationships by reference to an ethical conception of equality, and by inviting the state to distinguish between important and less important individual projects. Dagan and Dorfman presume that the state can know more than it can or should aim to know about people. By contrast, institutional theories of private law--of the sort that Dagan and Dorfman reject--retain the epistemic humility that is an important element of liberalism.