CORRECTIVE JUSTICE AND ITS ALTERNATIVES: AN ANALYSIS ON EUROPEAN CONSUMER LAW
CORRECTIVE JUSTICE AND ITS ALTERNATIVES: AN ANALYSIS ON EUROPEAN CONSUMER LAW

Summary/Abstract: The article elaborates on the concept of corrective justice and its reverberations in European Consumer Law, by decoupling corrective justice from its alternatives – punitive justice and utilitarian justice – based on the role played by professionals’ fault in the economy of each type of legal reasoning. The main objective is to deliver a set of characteristics for the applications of corrective justice in Consumer Law and to observe, trough the means of a brief inventory of the legal remedies, the role played by corrective justice in erasing disequilibria existing between professional parties and profane consumers, in response to the presumably intrinsic vulnerability of the latter. The paper is centred on the way corrective justice theories overpass the traditional fault-based approaches to professionals’ liability, thus court’s sentence being meant to ‘correct’ an economic or a psychical harm, instead of punishing deviant behaviour. As opposed to ‘punitive justice’, avoidance of reference to professional’s fault represents one of the major characteristics of ‘corrective justice’, along with the focusing on the eradication of inequitable harm, rather than on the preventive, educational or social impact of the judicial sentence. As opposed to the ‘economic’ or ‘utilitarian’ approaches of European Consumer Law, ‘corrective justice’ valorises the trial result not in terms of economic distribution of resources, but in terms of complete satisfaction of the victim, from the angle of recovered damages.

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