Contract as a Transfer of Ownership and Public Justification: Two Models

This article deals with Peter Benson’s claim that, unlike rival approaches such as promissory morality and the economic analysis of law, the theory of contract as transfer of ownership offers a public basis of justification for the coercive practice of contracts. The article points out that this claim can be understood in two ways, each corresponding to a model of public justification, namely, the avoidance model and the hermeneutic model. My ambition is to show that the avoidance model is beset by certain difficulties not encountered by the hermeneutic model, suggesting that the hermeneutic model is a more promising interpretation of the idea of public justification as applied to contracts.