The New Private Law blog was launched in May of 2015 by the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. Our contributors are private law scholars from around the country. The Blog features posts on private law topics such as including contracts, torts, property, intellectual property, remedies, restitution, and more. For additional information (including contact information), please see the Project’s homepage.
Contributors
Yonathan Arbel
Dr. Yonathan Arbel graduated from Harvard Law School in 2015 with an SJD degree. He also holds an advanced law degree from Stanford Law School and an LL.B. from the Hebrew university, summa cum laude, with a joint degree in law and an honors program in humanities. He was a clerk at the Israeli Supreme Court for the honorable Justice Ayala Procaccia, and served as Chief Justice (retired) Aharon Barak’s assistant. During his years at Harvard, Yonathan was a fellow with the John M. Olin Center for Law and Economics and was a Byse Fellow, leading a workshop at Harvard Law School on debts, contracts, and default. He has taught the Harvard Economics department on the economic analysis of contract law. Yonathan is a co-founder of the international legal research firm, Lexidale, and he headed the largest empirical study on cross-border mergers to date for the European Commission. Yonathan’s work features in both law reviews and peer review journals and is focused on the collection and enforcement of private legal obligations, and his work combines empirical and theoretical methodologies.
Aditi Bagchi
Aditi Bagchi teaches Contracts and Labor Law. She writes about the nature of contractual obligation, contract interpretation, and questions in political and moral philosophy as they arise in contract. She has explored these issues with respect to employment and consumer contracts in particular. She has a related interest in the comparative political economy of contract, labor and corporate law.
Professor Bagchi previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Before teaching, she was an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and a clerk for Judge Julio Fuentes on the United State Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Professor Bagchi obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Sc. in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, and an A.B. in Government and Philosophy from Harvard College.
Professor Bagchi’s SSRN page is here.
Shyam Balganesh
Shyam Balganesh’s scholarship focuses on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His most recent work examines the absence of good faith purchaser protection in copyright law and the consequences of this anomaly for the ownership of movable property. While at Yale Law School, he was an Articles & Essays Editor of the Yale Law Journal and a Student Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP). Prior to that he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. Recent articles include: “Copyright and Good Faith Purchasers,” California Law Review (forthcoming 2016), “Structure and Value in the Common Law,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review (forthcoming 2015), “Unplanned Coauthorship,” Virginia Law Review (2014), “Copyright Infringement Markets,” Columbia Law Review (2013), “Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism,” California Law Review (2013), “The Obligatory Structure of Copyright Law: Unbundling the Wrong of Copying,” Harvard Law Review (2012); and “The Normativity of Copying in Copyright Law,” Duke Law Journal (2012), among others.
Professor Balganesh’s SSRN page is here.
Samuel Beswick
Sam Beswick is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, The University of British Columbia. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School’s LLM and SJD programs and received his undergraduate degrees in law and economics from the University of Auckland. He has practiced litigation in New Zealand and England and was a Judges’ Clerk at the High Court of New Zealand. Sam is interested in the relationship between time and lawmaking—in particular, problems of retrospective changes in law, the common law limitation principle of discoverability, and the doctrine of prospective-only overruling. He has written about temporal issues as they arise in the law of restitution, torts, defences, remedies and legal theory. Sam has also published on the subject of interference with privacy, and on landlord–tenant contract and agency issues.
Dr Beswick’s SSRN page is here.
Daniel Clarry
Daniel Clarry was a Fellow in Private Law and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School where he was involved in various initiatives in the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. Before joining Harvard Law School, Daniel read for a Doctorate in Law at the University of Cambridge on a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholarship. Daniel’s doctoral dissertation examined the supervisory jurisdiction over trust administration. During his time at Cambridge, Daniel taught Equity and Trusts at an undergraduate level in various colleges and lectured at a postgraduate level in the Master of Laws (LL.M.) programme. Prior to reading for a Ph.D., Daniel practised law as a barrister with a broad commercial practice, advising and appearing in arbitration, mediation and litigation on a range of matters at Common Law and in Equity, as well as under various statutory enactments. Daniel has published widely and also given papers on a range of topics in Australia, Canada, England, Germany and the United States. Daniel is an Editor-in-Chief of The UK Supreme Court Yearbook – a position he has held for the past three volumes since 2013 <www.ukscy.org.uk>.
Janet Freilich
Janet Freilich is an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where she was a member of the Board of Student Advisors and the Journal of Law and Technology and was a student fellow with the John M. Olin Center for Law and Economics. Most recently, she served as Harvard Law’s inaugural postdoctoral fellow in private law and intellectual property with the Program on the Foundations of Private Law. In 2010 she won the Samsung-Stanford Patent Prize and the Irving Oberman Memorial Award in Intellectual Property in 2012 for her writing in patent law. Her research is in patent law, with a focus on the life sciences. She has published in the SMU Law Review, the Stanford Technology Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Prior to entering academia, she practiced at Covington & Burling LLP as a patent litigator and prosecutor. She graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology.
Andrew Gold
Andrew Gold is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and is associate director of the Center for the Study of Business Law and Regulation. He teaches corporations and torts, as well as seminars in tort theory and fiduciary law.
His primary research interests address private law theory, fiduciary law, and the law of corporations. His recent book, The Right of Redress (Oxford University Press, 2020), offers a new theory of private law. His work has appeared in the Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, University of Toronto Law Journal, and American Journal of Jurisprudence, among others. He is co-editor of multiple books on fiduciary theory, including Fiduciary Government (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Philosophical Foundations of Fiduciary Law (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Private Law (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Professor Gold previously was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School; an HLA Hart Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford; and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at McGill University. He is a co-founder of the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory and is a member of the American Law Institute.
Professor Gold’s SSRN page is here.
John Goldberg
John Goldberg, an expert in tort law, tort theory, and political philosophy, joined the Law School faculty in 2008. From 1995 until then, he was a faculty member of Vanderbilt Law School, where he served as Associate Dean for Research (2006-08). He is co-author of The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Torts (2010) and Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (3d ed. 2012). He has also published dozens of articles and essays in scholarly journals. Goldberg has taught an unusually broad array of first-year and upper-level courses, and has received multiple teaching prizes. A member of the editorial board of Legal Theory and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Tort Law, he served in 2009 as Chair of the Torts and Compensation Systems Section of the Association of American Law Schools. After receiving his J.D. in 1991 from New York University School of Law, Goldberg clerked for Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York and for Justice Byron White. He earned his B.A. with high honors from the College of Social Studies, Wesleyan University. He also holds an M. Phil. in Politics from Oxford University and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty, he briefly practiced law in Boston.
Professor Goldberg’s SSRN page is here.
John Golden
John Golden has taught administrative law, contracts, patent law, and writing seminars relating to innovation and intellectual property. Since 2011, he has served as faculty director of the Andrew Ben White Center in Law, Science and Social Policy. His research has focused primarily on issues relating to innovation policy, institutional design, patents, and remedies. John has a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an A.B. in Physics and History from Harvard College. Before joining the faculty of the University of Texas School of Law, he clerked for the Honorable Michael Boudin of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and then for Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court. He also worked as an associate in the intellectual property department of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP.
Professor Golden’s SSRN page is here.
Patrick Goold
Patrick Goold is a lecturer at City Law School, University of London. He was the Qualcomm Postdoctoral Fellow in Private Law and Intellectual Property. Patrick’s scholarly interests lie at the intersection of intellectual property, private law theory, and jurisprudence. He is currently engaged in a long-term research project that uses tort theory to understand, critique, and reform IP infringement. His articles have appeared in the Virginia Law Review, Boston University Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. Prior to joining Harvard, Patrick worked as the Microsoft Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, School of Law, and as an IP Fellow at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in law and economics from the International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (Germany), an LL.M. from Cornell Law School, and an LL.B. from Newcastle University Law School (UK). Additionally, Patrick has served as a repeat visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge and is qualified to practice law in New York.
Patrick Goold’s SSRN page is here.
Keith Hylton
Keith Hylton is a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Boston University (a University Professorship), and a professor of law at Boston University School of Law. He writes and teaches on topics in law and economics. Hylton has published numerous articles and books on topics in tort law, antitrust law, intellectual property law, labor law, the economics of litigation, and areas of regulation ranging from banking to health care. His most recent book, Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas, Harvard University Press, 2013, provides a utilitarian defense of the intellectual property laws. He is currently working on a torts textbook that integrates theoretical scholarship of the last three decades with a close analysis of tort doctrine (Tort Law: A Modern Text, Cambridge University Press).
In addition to teaching, Hylton serves as Editor of the Social Science Research Network’s Torts & Products Liability Law eJournal, Associate Editor of the International Review of Law and Economics, and Contributing Editor for the Antitrust Law Journal. He is a former Director and is currently Secretary of the American Law and Economics Association. He is a former Chair of the following American Association of Law Schools sections: Section on Law and Economics, Section on Torts and Compensation Systems, Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation. He is also a former Secretary of the American Bar Association Labor and Employment Law Section, a former member of the editorial board of the Journal of Legal Education, and a current member of the American Law Institute.
Professor Hylton’s SSRN page is here.
Daniel Kelly
Dan Kelly teaches property, remedies, and trusts and estates at Notre Dame Law School. His research focuses on the economic analysis of property law, including the assembly of land for economic development, the divisibility of property among multiple parties, and the transfer of wealth at death. He is the co-founder and co-director (with Margaret Brinig) of the Notre Dame Law and Economics Program. He has presented his research at a number of conferences and workshops, including the American Law and Economics Association, the International Society for New Institutional Economics, and the Harvard-Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Kelly is currently serving as an Associate Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of Property. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Law School, he previously worked as a judicial clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and a research fellow at Yale and Harvard Law School.
Professor Kelly’s SSRN page is here.
Greg Klass
Greg Klass is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Much of his scholarship concerns contract law and contract theory, ranging from technical subjects like implied certification under the False Claims Act to theoretical subjects like whether contract law is better understood as a duty-imposing or a power-conferring rule (the answer is both). Klass also writes on the “law of deception”: laws that regulate the flow of information between private parties to prevent dishonesty, disinformation, artifice, cover-up, and other forms of trickery, or to avert mistake, misunderstanding, miscalculation, and other types of false belief. The law of deception encompasses areas of law that are often taught and studied separately, such as the torts of deceit, negligent misrepresentation and nondisclosure, criminal fraud, securities fraud, false advertising law, food and other labeling requirements, and even information-forcing defaults and altering rules in contract law. Klass is currently writing a book on contract interpretation, construction and theory.
Professor Klass’ SSRN page is here and his bepress page is here.
Daniel Markovits
Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He has written articles on contract, legal ethics, distributive justice, democratic theory, and other-regarding preferences. Professor Markovits concentrates, in each area, on the ways in which legal orderings engage the human instinct in favor of sociality to sustain cooperation even among persons who pursue conflicting interests and endorse competing moral ideals. He finds respectful relations in surprising places, for example in contracts between self-interested buyers and sellers, litigation between adversary disputants, and political competition between partisan parties. In each case, Markovits argues, seemingly competitive interactions contain, in their immanent logic, forms of reciprocal recognition and respect. After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.
Professor Markovits’ SSRN page is here.
Professor Merrill writes widely in the fields of property and administrative law. In property, he has authored, with Henry Smith of Harvard, a series of articles relating the structure of property rights to information costs (“Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle,” Yale Law Journal 2000), as well as a leading casebook (“Property: Principles and Policies,” 2012); a series of studies, with Joseph Kearney of Marquette, on the role of public property rights in the development of the Chicago lakefront (“The Origins of the American Public Trust Doctrine: What Really Happened in Illinois Central,” U. Chicago L. Rev. 2004); and a variety of writings on constitutional property (“Property: Takings (with David Dana 2002);” “The Landscape of Constitutional Property,” Virginia L. Rev. 2000); “The Economics of Public Use,” Cornell L. Rev. 1986). In administrative law, he has written a number of pieces about the history of administrative law (“Article III, Agency Adjudication, and the Origins of the Appellate Review Model of Administrative law,” Columbia L. R. 2011), and about judicial review of agency interpretations of law (“Chevron’s Domain,” Geo. L. J. (with Kristin Hickman 2001)).
Professor Merrill is a graduate of Grinnell College (1971) and Oxford University (1973), where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Chicago Law School (1977). He clerked for the Hon. David L. Bazelon, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for the Hon. Harry A. Blackmun, U.S. Supreme Court. From 1987-1990 he was Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Merrill has previously taught at Northwestern Law School (1981-2003) and at Yale Law School (2008-2010). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Merrill’s SSRN page is here.
Anthony J. Sebok
Professor Sebok is an expert on mass torts, litigation finance, comparative tort law, and legal philosophy. Before coming to Cardozo in 2007, he was the Centennial Professor of Law and the Associate Dean for Research at Brooklyn Law School where he taught for 15 years. He was a Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University from 2005-06, and in 1999, he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Following law school, he clerked for Chief Judge Edward N. Cahn of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Professor Sebok has authored numerous articles about litigation finance and mass restitution litigation involving tobacco, handguns, and slavery reparations. He is the author of Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence, articles and essays on jurisprudence, and is the coeditor of The Philosophy of Law: A Collection of Essays. His casebook, Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress, which he coauthored with John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky, is used at several leading law schools. Professor Sebok is frequently quoted in the national media on timely legal issues, such as the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund. He is currently writing a book with Mauro Bussani of the University of Trieste on comparative tort law, which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Professor Sebok’s SSRN page is here.
Ted Sichelman
Ted Sichelman has been a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law since 2009. He writes and teaches the areas of intellectual property, law and entrepreneurship, empirical legal studies, law and economics, and computational legal studies. Professor Sichelman’s publications have been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and three of his articles are among the top 25 most-cited IP law articles published in the last five years. Selected publications include Purging Patent Law of “Private Law” Remedies, Texas Law Review (2014); The Vonage Trilogy: A Case Study in “Patent Bullying,” Notre Dame Law Review (2014); Enforcement as Substance in Tax Compliance, Washington and Lee Law Review (2013); Patents as Promoters of Competition: The Guild Origins of Patent Law in the Venetian Republic, San Diego Law Review (2012); Life After Bilski, Stanford Law Review (2011); Commercializing Patents, Stanford Law Review (2010);Patenting by Entrepreneurs: An Empirical Study, Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review (2010); High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2009).
Previously, Professor Sichelman clerked for the Honorable A. Wallace Tashima of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He practiced in the areas of intellectual property litigation and transactions, as well as appeals, at the law firms of Heller Ehrman and Irell & Manella. Prior to joining the University of San Diego, he was a Kauffman Foundation Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He has participated in a number of important U.S. Supreme Court cases as counsel and amicus curiae. In 2011, he worked with the office of Representative Zoe Loefgren to draft proposed language for the recently passed America Invents Act, the most substantial revision to the Patent Act since 1952. In 2012, Professor Sichelman served on the Lieutenant Governor of California’s task force to place a satellite office of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in California. Before practicing law, he founded and ran a venture-backed software company, Unified Dispatch. Professor Sichelman designed the company’s software and is a named inventor on several issued and filed patents and applications.
Professor Sichelman’s SSRN page is here
Henry Smith
Henry E. Smith is the Fessenden Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he directs the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. Previously, he taught at the Northwestern University School of Law and was the Fred A. Johnston Professor of Property and Environmental Law at Yale Law School. He holds an A.B. from Harvard, a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford, and a J.D. from Yale. After law school he clerked for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Smith has written primarily on the law and economics of property and intellectual property, with a focus on how property-related institutions lower information costs and constrain strategic behavior. He teaches primarily in the areas of property, intellectual property, natural resources, remedies, taxation, and law and economics. His books include The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Property (2010, coauthored with Thomas W. Merrill),Property: Principles and Policies (2d ed, 2012, coauthored with Thomas W. Merrill), and Principles of Patent Law (6th ed., 2013, co-authored with F. Scott Kieff, Pauline Newman, and Herbert F. Schwartz). He is the coeditor of The Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law (2011, with Kenneth Ayotte), Philosophical Foundations of Property Law (2013, with James Penner), and Perspectives on Property Law (4th ed., in press, with Robert C. Ellickson and Carol M. Rose).
Professor Smith’s SSRN page is here.
Ben Zipursky
Benjamin C. Zipursky is Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where he holds the James H. Quinn ’49 Chair in Legal Ethics and has twice served as Associate Dean (2001-03; 2010-13). He has taught as a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and Vanderbilt Law School. Professor Zipursky is a leading scholar in torts, jurisprudence, and legal ethics, and has published more than sixty articles and chapters on subjects ranging from punitive damages and conflicts of interest in mass tort litigation to the varieties of pragmatism within legal philosophy. He has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad and is the co-author of a leading casebook, TORTS: RESPONSIBILITY AND REDRESS (3d ed. 2012) (with J. Goldberg & A. Sebok) and THE OXFORD INTRODUCTIONS TO LAW: TORTS (2010) (with J. Goldberg).
Professor Zipursky’s SSRN page is here.