2022, Private Orderings and Public Justice

The 2022 Seminar in Private Law will devote itself to examining questions about the relationship between private orderings and public justice. We hope to explore how private law and the private arrangements that it enables and facilitates — e.g., through contracts, property rights, or corporate law — relate to (public) concerns with justice. This includes examining how public justice goals may be promoted or hampered through private arrangements, questioning the limits of private ordering, and reflecting critically on the interaction between private and public institutions more broadly. Our ambition is to study the subject from both theoretical and empirical perspectives and to engage champions, as well as critics, of private law. The Seminar will bring together lawyers with scholars from economics, sociology, history, and philosophy.

Spring 2022 Schedule

1 February	Thomas Piketty & Danielle Allen A Brief History of Equality
8 February	Gabriella Blum & John Goldberg The Unable or Unwilling Doctrine: A View from Private Law (Read the paper: “The Unable or Unwilling Doctrine: A View from Private Law”
15 February	Ariel Rubinstein Markets without Prices (Read the paper: “The Permissible and the Forbidden”)
22 February	Christopher Kutz & Saskia Sassen The Privatization of Public Functions
1 March	Rebecca J. Scott & Cynthia Estlund Labor, Slavery, and the Contemporary Workplace
8 March	Lisa Bernstein & Oliver Hart Inside and Outside the Firm Read the papers:  Managerial Contracting: A Preliminary Study A New Approach to Contracts Overcoming Contractual Incompleteness
29 March	Katharina Pistor The Law(s) of Capitalism
5 April	Carol M. Rose & Cristina Bicchieri Social Norms, Customs, and Private Law
12 April	Marietta Auer Private Law: Market Ordering or Creator of Injustice?
19 April	Neil Walker & Jeremy Waldron Property and Sovereignty
26 April	Jeff McMahan Wrongful Life