Private law structures the legal building blocks that most profoundly affect our social and economic life, notably property, contract, and torts as well as central aspects of family law, trust law, work law, and more. It thus governs our relationships with each other in arguably the most important spheres of our lives: in the market, … Read more
Singapore Management University (SMU) is inviting applications for its Presidential Early Career Professorship. This is a tenure-track opportunity for early career scholars with a Ph.D. earned in the past six years. SMU’s Yong Pung How School of Law is home to an excellent research cluster in private law theory and doctrine. For more details, see … Read more
A new volume on the legal philosophy of Adolf Reinach, Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law, edited by James Toomey, Marietta Auer, Paul Miller, and Henry Smith, is out now with Cambridge University Press and available Open Access through Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/reinach-and-the-foundations-of-private-law/C7EC03AE9485EE7BB6DA353F8692D5CE James Toomey has written a blog post about the volume: https://cambridgeblog.org/2025/07/reinach-and-the-foundations-of-private-law/ As stated by … Read more
We are now accepting applications! Materials are due by 9:00 am on March 12, 2025. See the call for applications for additional details and requirements: https://nplblog.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/PostdoctoralFellowshipinPrivateLawCallforApps2025.docx
We are now accepting applications! Materials are due by 9:00 am on March 5, 2024. See the call for applications for additional details and requirements.
The Berkeley Center for Private Law theory is happy to announce its call for Post-Doc Fellowship applications for a two-year position with an anticipated start date in Fall 2024. For more information about the position, including required qualifications and application materials, please visit: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04161. A PDF version of the full announcement can be accessed here.
By Samuel Beswick, Assistant Professor of Law, Peter A. Allard School of Law, The University of British Columbia. Last month, the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Federal Court of Australia each gave judgments on lawsuits against sitting judges for abusing their contempt-of-court power. The US case arose after an Ohio Municipal … Read more
For those who persist in the incorrect belief that equity is of antiquarian interest only, equity is now on YouTube. Recently Christophe Gösken of ETH Zurich interviewed Henry Smith about two of his papers on equity as meta-law. Video here. The papers can be found here and here.
Apply to be a Postdoctoral Fellow We are now accepting applications! Materials are due by 9:00 am on February 28, 2023. See the call for applications for additional details and requirements. Postdoctoral Fellowship in Private Law – Description Postdoctoral Fellowship in Private Law – Call for Applications
We are now accepting applications for student fellows for the academic year 2022-2023! Applications will be accepted until Friday, September 16, 2022. See the call for applications for additional details and requirements: Student Fellowship in Private Law – Call for Applications
The AALS Section on Remedies invites paper submissions for a panel on “Remedies in the Restatements” at the January 3–7, 2023 Annual Meeting. Please note that this meeting is currently planned to be held wholly in person. The Remedies session is scheduled for 3 to 4:40 pm on Thursday, January 5. The session, which is … Read more
Call for Applications Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Fellowships for U.S. Citizens at Bar-Ilan University: For an international research group on Voluntary Compliance, funded in part with an ERC Advanced Grant Title of the Project: “Generating Voluntary Compliance Across Doctrines and Nations: Integrating the Behavioural and Regulatory Aspects of Governments’ Ability to Trust the Public’s Cooperation, Ethicality … Read more
The Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School is seeking applicants for full-time, one- to two-year residential appointments as Postdoctoral Fellows in Private Law, starting in the fall of 2022. Application materials are due to Bradford Conner (conner@law.harvard.edu) by 9:00 a.m. on February 28, 2022. Postdoctoral Fellowship in Private Law The … Read more
The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University is happy to announce its call for Post-Doc Fellowship applications for the academic year 2022-23. We encourage applicants from all disciplines and fields, including economics, social sciences, business, the humanities, and the law. Please check our website — or a PDF version of the announcement — … Read more
Post by Andrew Verstein As Paul Miller recently observed, New Private Law scholars have largely hewed to tort, property, contract, or fiduciary law. Comparatively little attention has been devoted to business entities such as corporations and partnerships. Yet without the NPL label, there is fascinating work underway that is well worth the attention of this … Read more
Post by Henry Smith I have just read and greatly enjoyed this wonderful new book by Joe Kearney and Tom Merrill about the shaping of the Chicago Lakefront. Sometimes this shaping is literal (or littoral?), because Kearney and Merrill embed a highly expert and engagingly written history of the legal controversies surrounding the Lakefront with … Read more
We are excited to invite legal scholars to participate in a virtual Workshop on Private Law and Emerging Technology cosponsored by Harvard’s Project on the Foundations of Private Law, Yale’s Information Society Project, and Yale’s Center for Private Law. This Workshop will be a forum for in-depth engagement with works-in-progress at the intersection of private law, technology policy, … Read more
Post by Henry Smith A paper of mine on equity long in the works (and under different titles) is now out as Henry E. Smith, Equity as Meta-Law, 130 Yale L.J. 1050 (2021). Here is the abstract: With the merger of law and equity almost complete, the idea of equity as a special part of … Read more
The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University is happy to announce its call for Post-Doctorate and Doctoral Fellowship applications for the academic year 2021-22. We encourage applicants from all disciplines and fields, including economics, social sciences, business, the humanities, and the law. Please check our website — or a PDF version of the … Read more
Post by Andrew Gold, John Goldberg, Daniel Kelly, Emily Sherwin, and Henry Smith We have some good news – The Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law has just been published (Oxford; Amazon)! The Handbook offers exciting developments in scholarship dedicated to the study of private law in general, and to the New Private Law … Read more
Post by Andrew Gold I’m writing to put in a quick word about my new book, The Right of Redress – now published in the Oxford Legal Philosophy Series. (Here is a poster for the book, which includes a discount code.) Corrective justice theories of private law often focus on a wrongdoer’s obligation to fix … Read more
By Samuel Beswick, Assistant Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, The University of British Columbia I recently suggested on Balkinization that a storm seems to be brewing concerning the place of non-retroactivity doctrine (also called the doctrine of “prospective overruling”) in federal law. Non-retroactivity doctrine attempts to define the temporal scope of novel judgments … Read more
Post by Malcolm Lavoie. One of the most intriguing features of New Private Law scholarship is its recognition that diverse normative accounts often converge in explaining core private law doctrine. For instance, the right to exclude as an incident of ownership can be understood in consequentialist terms as a means of accounting for information costs, … Read more
We are pleased to announce the website launch for the Tenth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations: http://obligationsx.wpengine.com/ The conference is co-hosted by Harvard Law School and Melbourne Law School, and is being co-convened by John Goldberg, Andrew Robertson and Henry Smith. The conference theme, Private Law Inside and Out, is intended to provoke … Read more
UPDATE (5/11/2020): Due to a hiring freeze at Harvard University, there is no further information regarding the postdoctoral positions for The Project on the Foundations of Private Law. All inquiries should wait until further notice. — The Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School is seeking applicants for full-time, one- to two-year … Read more