This article examines the relationship between relationality and policy in tort law from an evolutionary perspective. While, as part of the regulatory system, tort law must evolve in response to structural and allocative policy concerns, its ability to do so is limited by the relational normative structure through which it operates and claims moral authority. This tension is often obscured in mainstream tort theory. Drawing on contractualist philosophy—which traces the implications of mutual recognition and respect across structural, allocative, and relational normative contexts—the article develops a principled reasoning framework that avoids rigid hierarchies and ad hoc balancing: negative policy reasons not to adopt tort norms take precedence in choices of regulatory regimes, while positive policy reasons must be diluted and integrated with relational reasons to shape the content of tort norms. This normative framework illuminates tort law’s ability to respond to complex normative challenges while retaining its integrity and unique value as a regulatory tool.

Racial justice is widely seen as a central moral and political ideal of our time, especially on the liberal-egalitarian left. And racial justice goes hand in hand with racial equality. The centrality of these ideals would be hard to justify if they had no bearing on material or economic inequality, or applied solely to semiotic and cultural issues. But we argue that, at present, the only plausible basis for understanding racial equality as a distinctive aim for the economic domain—rather than a mere implication of more general egalitarian or progressive principles—rests on minimal state, right-libertarian foundations. As such, racial equality is a strange focus for the left.

Legal theorists agree widely on two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the existence of a legal system: a legal system exists if (i) legal officials adopt a critically reflective attitude toward the legal system’s foundational rule, and (ii) the substantive laws of the system are “by and large” efficacious. The latter “efficacy condition” plausibly applies to all posited law, paradigmatically including modern centralized legal systems and less paradigmatic instances like international law. And yet, philosophers have also frequently pointed out the difficulty in determining precisely what this efficacy amounts to. In this article, I argue that the persisting difficulty of explaining the efficacy of law results from three tempting but inadequate assumptions about posited law and that our basic assumptions need to be revised accordingly.