Two Questions for Private Law Theory

How should we build theories of private law? This article claims that, in answering this question, we should keep in mind the distinction between wholesale questions about the best interpretation or justification of legal institutions, and retail questions about their internal operation—in other words, the distinction between questions about legal institutions and questions within them. This distinction has been obscured in recent private law theory. In this article, I argue that, if we want to make progress in understanding private law, we should reclaim the distinction