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TAXATION, THE PRIVATE LAW, AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2006

Kevin A. Kordana  and
David H. Tabachnick
Kevin A. Kordana
Affiliation:
University of Virginia School of Law
David H. Tabachnick
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Abstract

We argue that for theorists with a post-institutional conception of property, e.g., Rawlsians, there is no principled reason to limit the domain of distributive justice to tax and transfer-both tax policy and the rules of the private law are constructed in service to distributive aims. Such theorists cannot maintain a commitment to a normative conception of private law independent of their overarching distributive principles. In contrast, theorists with a pre-institutional conception of property can derive the private law from sectors of morality independent of distributive justice. Nevertheless, we argue, this does not entail that the private law, for pre-institutional theorists, must be sanitized of equity-oriented values. Non-libertarian pre-institutional theorists holding principled commitments to equity-oriented values are free to invoke either tax and transfer or the rules of the private law to attain them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , July 2006 , pp. 142 - 165
Copyright
© 2006 Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation

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Footnotes

We are grateful to John G. Bennett, Harry Dolan, Edward McCaffery, and Ellen Frankel Paul for written comments on a previous draft and to Eric Mack, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul, A. John Simmons, and the other contributors to this volume for valuable discussions.