This paper explores how an adequate understanding of legal relations can be aided by, and sometimes requires, returning to the foundations of our conception of legal relations.
The process of conceptualization is a process of revealing the form in legal relations. The two most fundamental forms of legal relations, first enunciated by Aristotle, are corrective justice and distributive justice. The thesis of this paper is that an analysis of legal relations can be coherent only if it is faithful to the form of justice appropriate to the particular legal relation under study.