Some say that private law ought to correct wrongs or to protect rights. Others say that private law ought to maximise social welfare or to minimise social cost. In this book, Emmanuel Voyiakis claims that private law ought to make our responsibilities to others depend on the opportunities we have to affect how things will go for us. Drawing on the work of HLA Hart and TM Scanlon, he argues that private law principles that require us to bear certain practical burdens in our relations with others are justified as long as those principles provide us with certain opportunities to choose what will happen to us, and having those opportunities is something we have reason to value. The book contrasts this 'value-of-choice' account with its wrong- and social cost-based rivals, and applies it to familiar problems of contract and tort law, including whether liability should be negligence-based or stricter; whether insurance should matter in the allocation of the burden of repair; how far private law should make allowance for persons of limited capacities; when a contract term counts as 'unconscionable' or 'unfair'; and when tort law should hold a person vicariously liable for another's mistakes.

This book focuses on the subject of choice of law as a whole and provides an analysis of its various rules, principles, doctrines and concepts. It offers a conceptual account of choice of law, called "choice equality foundation" (CEF), which aims to flesh out the normative basis of the subject. The author reveals that, despite the multiplicity of titles and labels within the myriad choice of law rules and practices of the U.S., Canadian, European, Australian, and other systems, many of them effectively confirm and crystallize CEF's vision of the subject. This alignment signifies the necessarily intimate relationship between theory and practice by which the normative underpinnings of CEF are deeply embedded and reflected in actual practical reality. Among other things, this book provides a justification of the nature and limits of such popular principles as party autonomy, most significant relationship, and closest connection. It also discusses such topics as the actual operation of public policy doctrine in domestic courts, and the relation between the notion of international human rights and international commercial dealings, and makes some suggestions about the ability of traditional rules to cope with the advancing challenges of the digital age and the Internet.

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.

This collection contributes to a fundamentally important set of debates about the nature of private law. The essays consider whether private law should be seen as having goals and, if so, whether those goals are particular to private as opposed to public law. They consider the legitimacy of the pursuit of community welfare goals in private law and the place of instrumentalist thinking in private law scholarship. They explore the relationship between the pursuit of policy goals and the other influences that shape private law, such as the formal values of certainty, consistency and coherence and the need to do justice to the parties to particular disputes. The collection analyses the role that particular policy goals do and should play in particular private law doctrines, and contributes to debate about the relationship between community welfare goals and considerations of interpersonal morality arising from the interactions between individuals. The contributors are drawn from across the common law world and offer a diverse range of perspectives on the controversies under consideration.

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.

The law of mitigation determines how a claimant's own response to a breach affects the damages they can recover. It responds to the basic accusation: 'although I did wrong, you made things worse'. Mitigation applies to all claims for compensation, regardless of the claimant's cause of action and irrespective of the defendant's level of fault. It is amongst the most litigated doctrines in private law and has significant implications for general theories of damages, and yet has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Mitigation in the Law of Damages provides the first comprehensive theoretical and doctrinal treatment of this important area of the law in any common law jurisdiction. It argues that contrary to the leading texts on damages, judges have been right all along to explain mitigation as an aspect of causation. But to see why, we must look beyond the 'but-for' concept of causation and understand the 'common-sense' causal principles used to attribute responsibility outside the law. This approach reveals a new understanding of the rules of mitigation and their relation to other doctrines. The implications are wide-ranging. First, mitigation applies symmetrically to benefits as well as harms, and encompasses a variety of damages doctrines that have previously been regarded as distinct. Second, the new account of mitigation advances our understanding of the legal concepts of causation, choice, and loss, and calls for a re-evaluation of existing theories of damages. Third, the book revives and develops arguments from Hart and Honoré's ground-breaking work 'Causation in the Law', with implications for every area of law where causal reasoning is invoked. Original and thought-provoking, Mitigation in the Law of Damages restates and explains the law of mitigation in a way that is accessible to both academics and practitioners.

The Choice Theory of Contracts is an engaging landmark that shows, for the first time, how freedom matters to contract.

This Handbook brings together the foremost authorities from around the world to provide 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.

This book examines the interconnections between artificial intelligence, data governance and private law rules with a comparative focus on selected jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific region. The chapters discuss the myriad challenges of translating and adapting theory, doctrines and concepts to practice in the Asia-Pacific region given their differing circumstances, challenges and national interests. The contributors are legal experts from the UK, Israel, Korea, and Singapore with extensive academic and practical experience. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of topics, including data protection and governance, data trusts, information fiduciaries, medical AI, the regulation of autonomous vehicles, the use of blockchain technology in land administration, the regulation of digital assets and contract formation issues arising from AI applications. The book will be of interest to members of the judiciary, policy makers and academics who specialise in AI, data governance and/or private law or who work at the intersection of these three areas, as well as legal technologists and practising lawyers in the Asia-Pacific, the UK and the US.

This book brings together a wide range of contributors from across the common law world to identify and debate the principal moral and systemic challenges facing private law in the remaining part of the twenty-first century. The various contributions identify serious problems relating to complexity and overload, threats to research and education, the law's unintelligibility, the unsatisfactory nature of the law reform process and a general lack of public engagement. They consider the respective future roles of statutes, codes, and judge-made law (in the form of both common law and equitable rules). They consider how best to organise the private law system internally, and how to co-ordinate it externally with other public and economic systems (human rights, regulation, insurance markets and social security frameworks). They address the challenges for private law presented by new forms of technology, and by modern demands for the protection of new and intangible forms of moral interest, such as interests in privacy, 'vindication' and 'personal choice'. They also engage with the critical contemporary debates about access to, and the privatisation of, civil justice. The work is designed as a source of inspiration and reference for private lawyers, as well as legislators, policy-makers and students.