 The fundamental disagreement between civil recourse writers and corrective justice writers turns on the remedial aspect of tort law. As a common-law subject, tort law develops largely (though not exclusively) through the litigation of concrete disputes; in the context of those disputes, the plaintiff is always seeking a remedy from the defendant. For corrective justice writers, the point of the remedy is to address the wrong; the relation between the defendant and the plaintiff that makes the defendant’s act towards the plaintiff wrongful is also the basis for the remedy. For civil recourse theorists, by contrast, the aim of a tort remedy is not to repair the wrong, but rather to empower plaintiffs to confront and make a demand on the persons who wronged them. The difference is subtle but important: although damages addressed to repairing the wrong provide one form of recourse, the idea of recourse is more general. Although remedies are occasioned by wrongdoing, their purpose is not simply to repair wrongs. Drawing on John Locke’s idea of the social contract, Goldberg and Zipursky suggest that, having prohibited self-help remedies, the state owes an obligation to persons who have been wronged to provide them with a civil avenue of recourse through which they can proceed against those who have wronged them; a tort remedy is something that the plaintiff is empowered to seek from the defendant rather than something that the plaintiff is entitled to receive from the defendant. Until the plaintiff initiates an action and prevails in it, the defendant is not under a duty to pay damages (Smith 2012; 2019). Rather than contending that a remedy repairs a wrong, civil recourse writers read the eighteenth-century Latin maxim ubi jus, ibi remedium—where there is a right there must be a legal remedy for its violation—as providing those who have been wronged with the opportunity to do something to those who have wronged them. Civil recourse writers point to advantages of understanding the nature of tort remedies in this way, notably in cases in which tort remedies are insufficient to repair wrongs. Monetary damages may allow the plaintiff to purchase a replacement for property that has been damaged or destroyed, but in many other cases they will not allow the plaintiff to continue life as if the wrong had not occurred. No amount of money can make up for the loss of a limb, or a child, or for the humiliation of a breach of privacy or the willful infliction of emotional distress (Hershovitz 2017). Civil recourse writers focus on such cases in order to argue that the point of damages is to enable the person who has been wronged to exact an appropriate remedy from the wrongdoer, even when that remedy would be inadequate by any compensatory measure. Even in the case of injuries that can be readily repaired, or of lost earnings that can be made up with their estimated monetary equivalent, civil recourse writers contend that the purpose of the remedy is better explained in terms of the recourse that it provides rather than the loss that it compensates. They argue that this provides a more unified account of tort law, rather than the one that is limited to a narrow class of interferences with agency and remedies that seek to restore agency (Sage 2021).