 Some critics of civil recourse theory have charged it with focusing on revenge in a way that is morally suspect and at odds with the ideas of legality. Some defenders have suggested that a focus on revenge provides a more satisfying interpretation of tort law (Oman 2011; Hershovitz 2014; Gold 2020). On this interpretation, the Lockean idea of a social contract is framed in terms of a default moral position in which self-help motivated by resentment or outrage is the appropriate response to having been wronged. For understandable reasons, states do not permit self-help, particularly self-help carried out in anger, and so must provide a substitute for the conduct they have prohibited. On this understanding, civil recourse is plainly distinct from corrective justice, because the point of the remedy is not merely to grant power to the plaintiff but to enable the plaintiff to act out of anger in a controlled setting. Such an interpretation faces both analytical and normative challenges. The analytical challenge is in explaining how the entire account does not presuppose a prior and more fundamental principle of corrective justice: if recourse is a substitute for legitimate revenge, the most obvious interpretation of the imagined social contract would represent the right of recourse as the compensation due to those who have been improperly deprived of a natural right to exact revenge. The normative difficulty comes from the assumption that there is a right to take revenge, so that the state owes compensation for depriving people of it. However pervasive the desire for revenge might be in human psychology, prohibiting it does not seem to be the kind of wrongful act that requires compensation (Ripstein 2011; Steel 2021). A different interpretation of the revenge rationale understands the granting of a right of recourse not as something that is owed as a matter of justice but rather as a political compromise in order to maintain peace by giving certain moral emotions an output. As a piece of political sociology, this account would need to explain how that outlet is properly preserved in a system in which most cases are settled, and why it is required in cases of injury for which the law provides a remedy even though outrage would seem both inappropriate and idiosyncratic, such as mistaken but harmless trespasses to land and cases in which the defendant’s best efforts fell below the standard imposed by law.