Corrective Justice In The Merchant Of Venice Essay

In Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, the climax is that of the trial. It is a scene that warrants a lot of discussion, especially due to the unfairness displayed in the name of revenge or comeuppance. It truly leads one to wonder if the law truly is moral. It also brings forth a debate on the scope of private law, and the idea of justice espoused by Ernest Weinrib.
Private law itself indeed serves its own purpose, but to say that private law should not try to imbibe moral values is also a bit reckless. Aristotle says that “corrective justice is the idea in which liability rectifies the injustice inflicted by one person on another”. He explains that in corrective justice, there has to be a transactional injustice between two parties. He further clarifies that it includes a restoral of equality once there has been a benefit for one party and a misfortune at the cost of the other. It is the shared relationship between the …show more content…
An alternate contrast to be noted is that corrective justice connects just two parties i.e. the wronged party and the party at benefit since correlativity must be seen in a bipolar relationship. In actuality, distributive justice can be connected to any number of gatherings as there is no restriction as such for various individuals who can be looked at and among whom something can be separated. The difference between corrective justice and distributive justice is so large that one can even say that they are opposite of each other. While distributive justice ensures that all the participants of a party receive the benefits that they are entitled to according to the situation, corrective justice only focuses on the maintenance and restoration of the notional equality with which the parties enter the transaction. This equality consists in persons' having what lawfully belongs to