The contributions to this edited volume engage with John Gardner's philosophical work on private law. The content is divided into three parts. The first part gathers contributions on general theoretical issues that bear upon private law. The second part is concerned with Gardner's well-known views on responding to wrongs and the justification of reparative duties - an issue that spans all of private law. The third part turns to theoretical issues within particular areas of private law. Its focus is Gardner's focus: tort law, but it also includes chapters on contract law and equity. The primary aim of Private Law and Practical Reason is to facilitate a critical assessment of the private law thinking of one of the most important legal philosophers of the last fifty years. Gardner's contributions to private law theory are recognised to be amongst the most significant and philosophically rich. This work assembles a group of contributors with diverse theoretical commitments, many of whom have not directly engaged previously with Gardner's work, and is intended to act as a reference point for central debates in private law theory, such as the role of moral duties, the justification of reparative obligations, and, more broadly, the role of reasons in private law.

Presents a moral argument, grounded in natural law, for private property and the limits of rights.

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.

Nearly twenty years after its original publication, The Idea of Private Law is widely recognized as a seminal contribution to legal philosophy, and one of the leading attempts to explain and justify the moral foundations of private law. Rejecting the functionalism popular among legal scholars, Ernest Weinrib advances the provocative idea that private law is an autonomous and non-instrumental moral practice, with its own structure and rationality. Weinrib draws on Kant and Aristotle to set out an approach to private law that repudiates the identification of law with politics or economics. Weinrib argues that private law is to be understood not as a mechanism for promoting efficiency but as a juridical enterprise in which coherent public reason elaborates the norms implicit in the parties' interaction. Private law, Weinrib tells us, embodies a special morality that links the doer and the sufferer of harm. Weinrib elucidates the standpoint internal to this morality, in opposition to functionalists, who view private law as an instrument in the service of external and independently justifiable goals. After establishing the inadequacy of functionalist approaches, Weinrib traces the implications of the formalism he proposes for our ideas of the structure, coherence, and normative grounding of private law. Furthermore, the author shows how this formalism manifests itself in the leading doctrines of private law liability. Finally, he describes the public but non-political role of the courts in articulating the special morality of private law. This revised edition makes accessible one of the major works of modern legal theory. It includes a new introduction by the author, looking back at the work, its origins, and its aspirations.

New Directions in Private Law Theory brings together some of the best new work on private law theory, reflecting the breadth of this increasingly important field. The contributions interrogate a wide range of topics including aspects of private law doctrine, its development, ordering and application. The authors adopt a variety of different approaches and contribute to ongoing and important debates about the moral foundations of private law, the individuation of areas of private law and the connections between private law and everyday moral experience. Questions addressed include: Does the diversity identified amongst claims in unjust enrichment mean that the category is incoherent? Are claims in tort law always about compensating for wrongs? How should we understand parties’ agreement in contract? The contributions shed new light on these and other topics, and the ways in which they intersect and open up new lines of scholarly enquiry. The book will be of interest to researchers working in private law and legal theory, but it will also appeal to those outside of law, most notably researchers with an interest in moral and political philosophy, economics and history.

Contemplating the nature, practice and study of private law, this comprehensive book offers a detailed overview of private law’s theoretical dimensions. It promotes a reflective attitude towards the topic, encouraging the reader to question how private law is practiced and studied, what this implies for their own engagement in the field and what kind of private lawyer they want to be. This thought-provoking book draws on examples from a range of legal systems to provide philosophical perspectives on the diverse dimensions of private law.

Standing in Private Law: Powers of Enforcement in the Law of Obligations and Trusts develops the idea that we should attend more to 'standing', conceived as a power to hold another accountable before a court as a distinct private law concept. Prominent lawyers have claimed that private law does not have or need standing rules, yet this seems implausible. If private law is obligation-imposing, we need rules about who can sue on these obligations to hold their bearers accountable. This book argues that a reason why standing has been relatively overlooked and under-conceptualized, receiving meagre attention from private lawyers, is because it has been obscured from plain sight: it has been swallowed up by the more dominant and capacious concept of a 'right'. However, standing is a distinct and separable private law concept that can and should be distinguished more clearly from 'right'. Doing so is necessary for the continued rational development of private law doctrine. It is also necessary for a deeper theoretical understanding of standing's significance, and its place within the remedial apparatus of private law. This book argues that an implicit standing rule exists across the law of obligations. It examines its justifiability, and the justifiability of exceptions to the rule. It also shows how and why recognising standing's distinctiveness can help us to interpret, develop, and resolve debates within different areas of private law, including the laws of contract, torts, unjust enrichments, and relatedly, the law of trusts.

This book analyses in depth the distinctively Scottish themes in the work of Sir Neil MacCormick, the world-renowned legal philosopher and prominent Scottish public intellectual who died in 2009 after holding the Regius Chair in Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at Edinburgh University for 36 years. MacCormick's work, and works about MacCormick, attract both a domestic and an international audience. Readers will gain an understanding of how MacCormick's Scottish roots, interests and commitments coloured his work - both his distinctively Scottish writings and the overall intellectual outlook that informed his broader legal and philosophical writings.The book provides a well rounded appreciation of the Scottish dimension in MacCormick's thinking and writing. It focuses on a number of prominent Scottish themes in MacCormick's work and life and is structured around four key themes: 1) the nature and identity of a legal system; 2) sovereignty, European integration and Scottish independence; 3) the legacy of the legal and political thought of the Scottish enlightenment; and 4) the role of the academic in the Scottish public sphere.

This volume examines the relationship between Christian legal theory and the fields of private law. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in private law theory, and this book contributes to that discussion by drawing on the historical, theological, and philosophical resources of the Christian tradition. The book begins with an introduction from the editors that lays out the understanding of "private law" and what distinguishes private law topics from other fields of law. This section includes two survey chapters on natural law and biblical sources. The remaining sections of the book move sequentially through the fields of property, contracts, and torts. Several chapters focus on historical sources and show the ways in which the evolution of legal doctrine in areas of private law has been heavily influenced by Christian thinkers. Other chapters draw out more contemporary and public policy-related implications for private law. While this book is focused on the relationship of Christianity to private law, it will be of broad interest to those who might not share that faith perspective. In particular, legal historians and philosophers of law will find much of interest in the original scholarship in this volume. The book will be attractive to teachers of law, political science, and theology. It will be of special interest to the many law faculty in property, contracts, and torts, as it provides a set of often overlooked historical and theoretical perspectives on these fields.

Many of the most influential contributions to private law scholarship in the latter part of the twentieth century go beyond purely doctrinal accounts of private law. A distinctive feature of these analyses is that they straddle the divide between legal philosophy, on the one hand, and the sort of traditional doctrinal analysis applied by the courts, on the other. The essays contained in this collection continue in this tradition. The collection is divided into two parts. The essays contained in the first part consider the nature of, and justification for, private rights generally. The essays in the second part address the justification for particular private law rights and doctrines. Offering insightful and innovative analyses, this collection will appeal to scholars in all fields of private law and legal theory.