Sadie Blanchard

Private Law Fellowship at Yale Law School Center for Private Law

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The Yale Law School Center for Private Law is now accepting applications for the 2018-19 Fellow in Private Law.

The Fellowship is designed for graduates of law or related Ph.D. programs who are interested in pursuing an academic career and whose research is related to any of the Center for Private Law’s research areas, which include contracts (including commercial law, corporate finance, bankruptcy, and dispute resolution), property (including intellectual property), and torts. More information about the Center can be found here.

The Fellowship in Private Law is a full-time, one-year residential appointment, with the possibility of reappointment. Up to half of the Fellow’s work time is devoted to operating the Center; the remaining time is reserved for the Fellow’s own scholarship and projects. Duties include organizing the Seminar in Private Law, academic workshops, and conferences, among other Center initiatives, and maintaining the Center’s website (which does not require specialized technical skills).

The Fellow will begin in the Summer or Fall of 2018. Fellows receive a competitive stipend plus benefits and office space at the Yale Law School.

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Yale Law School, Private Funds Conference — Sadie Blanchard

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Post by Sadie Blanchard The Yale Law School Center for Private Law will host the Private Funds Conference: Private Equity, Hedge Funds, and Venture Capital on November 17, 2017. The conference will bring leading theorists from law, economics, finance, and sociology into dialogue with people with experience at the highest levels of experience with private funds, … Read more

Private Equity Conference Announcement – Yale Law School

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Save the Date The Yale Law School Center for Private Law will host a Private Equity Conference on November 17, 2017. The conference will bring leading theorists from law, economics, finance, and sociology into dialogue with people with experience at the highest levels of private equity, including from law practice, financial firms, and institutional investors.  Oliver … Read more

Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law: Dispute Resolution in Universities — Sadie Blanchard

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

At the last session of this spring’s Seminar in Private Law, we considered dispute resolution in universities. The speakers were Jonathan Holloway, Dean of Yale College and Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies, and Mary Rowe, who teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and was MIT’s Ombuds for over 40 years. In view of the tumult on campuses over the past year, it seemed apt to consider universities as part of our survey of dispute resolution beyond the state. What is distinctive about conflicts in this setting? What processes are best suited to resolve or manage them? Are protests evidence of a failure of dispute resolution, or are they a desirable or inevitable form of complaint?

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The Iran Nuclear Deal and Negotiations Between Enemies — Sadie Blanchard

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

In its penultimate session of the spring, the Seminar in Private Law at Yale Law School considered the negotiations toward the Iran nuclear deal. Catherine Ashton, former European Union foreign minister who was a key participant in the negotiations, spoke together with Philip Bobbitt of Columbia Law School.

Ashton discussed the dynamics of the negotiations and the decisions about structuring them that were, in her view, critical to their success. Among them was a “noises off” policy instituted early by the delegates: they mapped out the issues that had to be part of a deal and excluded other considerations from being raised in the negotiations. That policy served to prevent future derailment of the critical negotiating points.

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Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law: Online Dispute Resolution

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

Last week, Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law took up online dispute resolution (ODR). Colin Rule, who created eBay’s and PayPal’s dispute resolution systems and now runs a startup that builds ODR platforms, spoke together with Tom Tyler, a social psychologist who studies how judgments about the justice of procedures impact legitimacy and cooperation.

Rule began by demonstrating an ODR platform he created in cooperation with the Dutch government, and which he presented as a prototype for the future of justice and access to justice. The platform, Rechtwijzer, is for couples contemplating or going through divorce. It provides information about legal options as well as a platform on which couples can collaborate to solve problems, negotiate, and, if necessary, mediate issues such as child custody, alimony, child support, and the division of property.

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Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law: Non-Hierarchical Enforcement in International Relations

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

Last week, Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law considered non-hierarchical enforcement. Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro discussed their work on outcasting as a method of law enforcement, and Leif Wenar discussed his new book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World.

Hathaway and Shapiro describe outcasting as a type of law enforcement that does not rely on physical coercion by official actors within a legal regime. Instead, outcasting relies on “denying the disobedient the benefits of social cooperation and membership.” They find outcasting in orders that are clearly legal orders, such as classic canon law, medieval Icelandic law, and contemporary United States public law. It therefore follows that international law’s heavy reliance on outcasting for enforcement does not render it “not law.”

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Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law: Disputing Ends and Means in the Field of Human Rights

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

Last week in Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law, Iain Levine, Deputy Executive Director at Human Rights Watch, and Sam Moyn, Professor at Harvard Law School, began a discussion of practical and theoretical perspectives on the legitimation of human rights. A preliminary point might help to orient readers, who would not be alone if they wondered what human rights have to do with private law or with the Seminar’s theme of how dispute resolution processes that exist outside of established legal or political structures can generate authority. Most nations, after all, have agreed to several multilateral human rights treaties negotiated within the United Nations. Human rights are monitored and enforced by international tribunals and other bodies created and controlled by states through the United Nations and other political assemblies of states. The international human rights regime seems to be precisely a political and legal structure designed and built by states.

Nonetheless, relevant questions remain. For example, how did this state of affairs come to be? The history of the global ascent of human rights is short. What is the content of human rights, and how should they be protected? What do they imply for sovereignty and public authority? Those issues remain contested not only within the state-centric human rights architecture but also outside of it. Such questions make human rights an appropriate object of study by those who wish to better understand conflict resolution outside of established structures.

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Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law: The Role of Business Elites in Negotiating the End of Apartheid

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

Last week’s session of the Seminar in Private Law at Yale Law School considered the role of business elites in negotiating the end of the apartheid state in South Africa. Michael Young discussed the secret negotiations he convened in England during his tenure at a British mining firm operating in South Africa between the African National Congress in exile and Afrikaner elites. Itumeleng Makgetla presented a paper she is coauthoring with Ian Shapiro that applies game theory to the role of South African business leaders in negotiating the transition to democracy.

Young set the stage by recalling how dramatically international relations in the 1980s were shaped by the Cold War’s iron division of the world. South Africa’s social, economic, political, and security conditions were deteriorating: a state of emergency had been declared; unemployment was rising; and foreign investment was fleeing. Prime Minister P.W. Botha had begun running the country through a security bureaucracy, alienating even members of his own party. Despite the widely recognized instability and injustice of the regime, the United States and the United Kingdom were unwilling to offer diplomatic support to a transition because of the ANC’s communist affiliations within and outside South Africa.  

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Yale Law School’s Seminar in Private Law: Dispute Resolution Beyond the State — Sadie Blanchard

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Post by Sadie Blanchard, Research Fellow Yale Law School

Over the coming term, the Seminar in Private Law at Yale Law School will explore dispute resolution outside the state. Disputes are often resolved through processes that fall outside any previously authorized political structure. Because such processes cannot rely on the state for legitimacy, they owe whatever authority they achieve to their own natures. To better understand this category of dispute resolution mechanisms, the Seminar will bring together scholars in law, the social sciences, and the human sciences and people who practice law, politics, medical research, human rights advocacy, university administration, and commerce to discuss their ideas and experiences concerning such free-standing efforts to resolve disputes.

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