Rawlsian justice, pre-institutional concepts and the private law

This project addresses the Rawlsian post-institutional conception of justice and its relationship to pre-institutional values and legal institutions. I focus on what I take to be several central and distinctive features of Rawlsianism: its post-institutional conception of justice, the consequentialist (i.e., forward looking) and maximizing (though non-utilitarian) nature of the principles of justice, and the scope of what Rawls calls the "basic structure of society." The project describes what I take to be important, if underappreciated, insights into Rawlsianism and then shows that these insights are helpful in resolving and answering on-going debates and criticisms in the contemporary philosophical and legal literature. I contrast what I take to be the outcomes of these features of Rawlsianism with the normative values found in what I call pre-institutional conceptions of liberalism. I address how these various features of Rawlsianism bear on important on-going debates in contemporary legal and political philosophy including the private law, democracy and the dispute over political obligation. The project draws upon heavily upon Rawls's texts however it is essentially normative, as opposed to interpretive. The distinction between Rawls's own views and a plausible Rawlsian account of matters will be particularly relevant where the Rawlsian texts are unclear or where it seems that Rawls has perhaps misunderstood the force of his own theory or the proper ordering of various normative concepts. When such issues arise, I attempt to resolve them in light of contemporary debate in legal and political theory with the general organizing theme that such ambiguity is often resolvable by acknowledging the ramification of what I take to be the consequences of a full-blown post-institutional conception of justice. I maintain that as important as these features of Rawlsianism are, they have been at times under appreciated---sometimes by Rawls himself---and that this under-appreciation has caused misunderstanding in the philosophical and legal literature.