1 Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

2 Id. at xi.Google Scholar

3 Id.Google Scholar

4 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974).Google Scholar

5 See Bruce A. Ackerman, Private Property and the Constitution 190–289 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

6 See, e.g., Ackerman, supra note 1, at 258.Google Scholar

7 Id. at 8.Google Scholar

8 For example, “a liberal relationship is defined as a social condition in which power wielders ask and answer each others' questions of legitimacy.”Id. at 71. “A liberal state is nothing more than a collection of individuals who can participate in a dialogue in which all aspects of their power position may be justified in a certain way.”Id. at 72 (emphasis in original). Thus, liberalism is defined as Ackermanism.Google Scholar

9 Id. at 10, 138.Google Scholar

10 Id. at 161.Google Scholar

11 Id. at 327.Google Scholar

12 Id. at 264.Google Scholar

13 Id. at 11.Google Scholar

14 Id. at 75.Google Scholar

15 Ackerman affirms the right of the individual not to talk about questions of legitimacy, beyond being able to say “‘I should get X because I'm at least as good as you are.’”Id. at 372. But such a statement is not good evidence of “dialogic competence”—it is not necessarily a mature or even rational statement.Google Scholar

16 Id. at 80.Google Scholar

17 See id. at 10–12, 359–69.Google Scholar

18 See id. at 12.Google Scholar

19 Id. at 376.Google Scholar

20 Id. at 4.Google Scholar

21 Id. at 249.Google Scholar

22 See Stigler, George J., Wealth, and Possibly Liberty, 7 J. Legal Stud. 213 (1978).Google Scholar

23 This argument is developed in Posner, Richard A., Utilitarianism, Economics and Legal Theory, 8 J. Legal Stud. 103 (1979); id., The Economics of Justice, ch. 3 (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Ackerman, supra note 1, at 58.Google Scholar

25 Id. at 66.Google Scholar

26 See Id. at 361.Google Scholar

27 See id. at 12.Google Scholar

28 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 5, ch. 3 (new & rev. ed. with English trans, by H. Rack-ham, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).Google Scholar

29 See id., bk. 5, ch. 4, 5.Google Scholar

30 Ackerman, supra note 1, at 247.Google Scholar

31 See id. at 247–48.Google Scholar

32 Id. at 269.Google Scholar

33 See references in note 23 supra.Google Scholar

34 Ackerman, supra note 1, at 311.Google Scholar

35 Id. at 297 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

36 Id. at 160.Google Scholar

37 Id.Google Scholar

38 Id. at 127.Google Scholar

39 Id. at 129.Google Scholar

40 Id.Google Scholar

41 This possibility vitiates an alternative argument that Ackerman offers against infanticide: that it interferes with the rights of putative adoptive parents. Id. Taken seriously, this would also be an argument against abortion. But Ackerman would in general permit abortion.Google Scholar

42 Id. at 126.Google Scholar

43 See id. at 57.Google Scholar

44 See Posner, Richard A., The Concept of Corrective Justice in Recent Theories of Tort Law (10 J. Legal Stud., Jan. 1981, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Aristotle, supra note 27, at bk. 5, ch. 2, 11. 12–13; ch. 4.Google Scholar

46 Id., at 274–75.Google Scholar

47 See, e.g., Borgo, John, Causal Paradigms in Tort Law, 8 J. Legal Stud. 419 (1979); Epstein, Richard A., Nuisance Law: Corrective Justice and Its Utilitarian Constraints, 8 J. Legal Stud. 49 (1979).Google Scholar

48 See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, ch. 9 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

49 Id. at 226–27.Google Scholar

50 See Bruce Aune, Kant's Theory of Morals 160 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

51 See Aristotle, supra note 27, at 268–69.Google Scholar

52 Dworkin, supra note 47, at 227 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

53 Id.Google Scholar

54 Id. (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

55 Id.Google Scholar

56 Dworkin, Ronald M., Is Wealth a Value? 9 J. Legal Stud. 191, 223 n.14 (1980). There is another brief discussion of the right to equal concern and respect in Taking Rights Seriously, but neither the content nor origin of the right is explained, although Rawls is said to have implied such a right. See Dworkin, supra note 47, at 180–83. See also id. at 273, where the right is again briefly discussed.Google Scholar

57 Dworkin, supra note 47, at 238.Google Scholar

58 Id.Google Scholar

59 See, e.g., Phelps, Edmund S., The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism, 62 Am. Econ. Rev. 659 (1972).Google Scholar

60 See Coleman, Jules L., Book Review, 66 Calif. L. Rev. 885, 915–18 (1978).Google Scholar

61 See Dworkin, supra note 47, at 234–35, 275.Google Scholar

62 See Posner, The Economics of Justice, supra note 22, ch. 13.Google Scholar

63 Id. at 239.Google Scholar