In this paper, I argue against a widely held view about interpersonal moral relations inspired by Benjamin Cardozo’s landmark judgment in Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Company, which I call the Relational Fault Requirement. The requirement holds that in order for A to commit a directed wrong against B, A must be at fault in relation to B. I present two ways of understanding wrongs that violate this requirement: (1) that one is wronged if one is harmed by a wrongful action, and (2) that one is wronged if one is harmed by a wrongful action and the outcome one suffers is sufficiently similar to the grounds on which the action is wrong. Accepting either of these ideas requires rejecting the Relational Fault Requirement and encourages us to rethink the core elements of directed wrongdoing.

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.

Minors should not be punished as harshly as adults for any given crimes they commit. The most common explanation of why is that youths have diminished responsibility-relevant capacities. Recently, Gideon Yaffe has defended the revisionist view that the reason to give juvenile offenders a break in sentencing derives from their political disempowerment. Here, I defend a third alternative: youth is a developmental stage between legal infancy and adulthood during which people are owed special opportunities to cultivate their moral capacities and otherwise fortify themselves against engaging in criminal wrongdoing. Given that minors have not yet received all those opportunities they are owed, they have a claim to mitigated punishment on account of lacking a fully fair opportunity to protect themselves against criminal liability and punishment. They also have distinctive grounds to object to any punishment that would thwart their continued receipt of the developmental opportunity they are owed as youths.

Many claim that if a state is responsible for structural injustice, then that state lacks the standing to hold marginalized offenders to account. Call this the compromised standing claim. I argue that this claim sits in tension with a further assumption: that states hold offenders to account in their people’s name. Specifically, I argue that when A holds B accountable in the name of C, A’s own hypocrisy and complicity are not sufficient to undermine her standing to hold B accountable. This means that there exists a gap between a state’s responsibility for structural injustice and its compromised standing. After motivating this challenge, I consider one response according to which the people have lost their standing with respect to marginalized offenders and that the state, qua representative, inherits the standing of its people. I propose two strategies for making this response precise and argue that neither can vindicate the compromised standing claim in its standard form.

I develop and defend a novel account of the private law of remedies according to which it is best understood as facilitating deliberations between the parties about the just outcome of their dispute rather than correcting injustice or righting wrongs. According to my democratic conception, the parties are the ones who ideally ought to resolve moral uncertainty about justice between them by deliberating together in good faith about what justice requires. The law of remedies should therefore often refrain from offering a final judgment about what justice between the parties requires, instead setting and implementing fair default rules and principles in the shadow of which the parties will ideally articulate for themselves a joint vision of justice for their relationship.

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.