Correctively Justifying the Case of Alex Ferg
By Radhika Goyal, 7th October 2014
The Alex Ferg Case that dealt with a person suffering from CUD syndrome caused as a result of consumption of the generic drug, "CUD", came to an end with the defendants having no maintainable suit against them. According to the judgment, multiple defendants could not be held liable, as there was an absence of harm and wrong in the same transaction. The harm could not be attributed to any one of the defendants.
The concept of corrective justice, the theory on which the judgment of the court was based, cannot be applied here. Corrective justice is a normative framework. This means it is an ideal-typical framework constructed and deployed to frame or box the set of acceptable considerations relevant to liability between two parties. Corrective justice is based on the concept of correlativity, which serves as the guiding criteria for defining the relevant considerations for liability.
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SAM PETERS, PRESIDENT OF THE MOLOKAI HOMESTEADERS ...Considerations, which are not correlative as between the two parties, are irrelevant to the determination of liability. The term "two parties" is of relevance here. The foremost condition of applying this type of justice states the presence of only two parties wherein this case had multiple defendants, making the transactions between two parties invalid. Had there been only one pharmaceutical company, the corrective justice concept would have applied in the sense that it would have provided a coherent understanding and linked both the injustice and rectification. Alex Ferg would have been compensated for the damages drawing upon the lines of establishing the gain and loss - the loss of the plaintiff compensated by the gain of the defendant. There would have been, then, a correlation between the plaintiff and the single defendant.
However, the act of wrong still exists whether the...