This volume brings together essays by scholars from around the world covering issues in general private law theory as well as specific fields including the theoretical analysis of tort law, property law, and contract law.
This comprehensive Research Handbook provides an unparalleled overview of contemporary private law theory. Featuring original contributions by leading experts in the field, its extensive examinations of the core areas of contracts, property and torts are complemented by an exploration of a breadth of topics that cross the divide between private and public law, including labor law and corporate law.
"This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects-property, contracts, and torts-as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law's various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law-including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological- yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law."--
Methodology in Private Law Theory: Between New Private Law and Rechtsdogmatik represents a first-of-its-kind dialogue between leading lights in German and American private law theory. The chapters in this volume build upon established traditions of scholarship in German private law and harness resurgent scholarly interest in private law in the United States, inviting readers to question how private law functions on both sides of the Atlantic. In the context of the cross-fertilization of legal scholarship, the transnationalization of law, and the historical ties between US and German debates on methodology, the volume encourages reasoned engagement with private law doctrines and institutions. It further invites reflexive consideration of diverse ways in which methods of legal analysis influence social practices where law is given, received, asserted, and negotiated. Leading methodologies of the past and present are subject to fresh elucidation and insightful criticism, including those of legal formalism, legal conceptualism, legal realism, law and economics, legal philosophy, legal history, empirical jurisprudence, Rechtsdogmatik, and other varieties of doctrinal scholarship. Providing the necessary background for understanding different legal cultures and traditions in private law, Methodology in Private Law Theory is a must-read for anyone working within the field.
Civil wrongs occupy a significant place in private law. They are particularly prominent in tort law, but equally have a place in contract law, property and intellectual property law, unjust enrichment, fiduciary law, and in equity more broadly. Civil wrongs are also a preoccupation of leading general theories of private law, including corrective justice and civil recourse theories. According to these and other theories, the centrality of civil wrongs to civil liability shows that private law is fundamentally concerned with the expression and enforcement of norms of justice appropriate to interpersonal interaction and association. Others, sounding notes of caution or criticism, argue that a preoccupation with wrongs and remedies has meant neglect of other ways in which private law serves justice, and ways in which private law serves values other than justice. This volume comprises original papers written by a wide variety of legal theorists and philosophers exploring the nature of civil wrongs, their place in private law, and their relationship to other forms of wrongdoing.
This Handbook is the first comprehensive account of comparative environmental law. It examines in detail the methodological foundations of the discipline as well as the substance of environmental law across countries from four vantage points: country studies from all continents, responses to common problems (including air pollution, water management, nature conservation, genetically modified organisms, climate change and energy, chemicals, waste), foundational components of environmental law systems (including principles, property rights, administrative and judicial organisation, command-and-control regulation, market mechanisms, informational techniques and liability mechanisms), and common interactions of environmental protection with the broader public, private, and criminal law contexts. The volume brings together the foremost authorities in this field from around the world to provide a concise, self-contained, and technically rigorous account of environmental law as a single overall system.
In what, if any sense are our torts and our breaches of contract 'wrongs'? These two branches of private law have for centuries provided philosophers and jurists with grounds for puzzlement and this book provides both an outline of, and intervention in, contemporary jurisprudential debates about the nature and foundation of liability in private law.
This book brings together a group of renowned contract lawyers to analyse how their own legal systems deal with twelve cases of morally dubious agreements. It explores questions of validity, enforceability and the availability of remedies, while offering crucial insights into the divergences and converges between different European legal systems.
