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 ..read more

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 ..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 at law.harvard.edu) by 9:00 a.m. on February 22, 2022.  Postdoctoral Fellowship in Private Law The Fellowship is a one- or two-year, residential postdoctoral program specifically designed to identify, cultivate, and promote promising scholars early in their careers with a primary interest in private law.  Pri ..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 — for more information. Deadline for submission of all application materials: Jan 31, 2022. Application materials should be sent by e-mail to: safracen@tauex.tau.ac.il ..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 blog’s readers. As an exhibit, I commend Harwell Wells’s new paper (forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review)  “The Personification of the Partnership.” Wells’s focus is the familiar debate over entity ontology. Do entities “exist” or ..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 a social and even geographical account. Human activity impacted the actual Lakefront not just through landfill, over which some controversies, sometimes even violent ones, were fought, but even through efforts by various landowners to promote accretion. A ..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, and the societal changes engendered by widespread adoption of new technologies. Rather than identifying sui generis policy proposals for specific ills, we are interested in ..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 our legal system or a mode of decisionmaking has fallen out of view. This Article argues that much of equity is best understood as performing a vital function. Equity and related parts of the law solve complex and uncertain problems—including interdependent behavior and misuses of legal rules by opportunists—a ..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 Post-Doc announcement — for more information. Deadline for submission of all application materials: Feb 8, 2021. Application materials should be sent by e-mail to: safracen@tauex.tau.ac.il ..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 (“NPL”) in particular. The NPL movement embraces the traditional common law subjects (property, contracts, and torts), and also adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law. It includes important areas that have been neglected in the ..read more