 This focus on the plaintiff’s right against the state distinguishes civil recourse theory from corrective justice but raises a further puzzle about the status of that right. As a doctrinal and interpretive matter, private rights of action in tort have been abolished in particular cases, as most prominently New Zealand has done for all personal injuries but, more pervasively, as virtually every common law country has done for a broad range of workplace accidents that take place in the course of employment. This raises two possibilities, each of which faces difficulties. One possibility is that abolishing the private cause of action abolishes the victim’s right against the state to be empowered to seek redress, in which case the principle that there is no right without a remedy is dramatically narrowed in scope. Rather than seeing a right to recourse as something the state must grant because self-help has been abolished, on this first alternative, the right of recourse appears to apply only to cases in which the state has granted both the right and the cause of action, since the state can abolish both self-help and the cause of action. While this first alternative describes a familiar structure of positive law, it detaches civil recourse theory from its roots in Lockean political philosophy and so deprives it of its broader explanatory ambitions. Alternatively, prohibiting self-help in cases of automobile accidents or workplace accidents while also failing to provide a private right of action could be characterized as a violation of the rights of those who have been denied both self-help and recourse, in which case the theory would require that the state must provide a remedy for that violation. Such an account fails to fit familiar features of legal doctrine, which does not require states limiting the rights of action to provide an alternative remedy to those who would otherwise be able to exercise them. Other critics have criticized the ways in which civil recourse theory characterizes legal powers (Herstein 2015), or suggested that it only applies in circumstances in which corrective justice cannot be realized (Stone 2022).