Corporations

This chapter situates corporations and corporate law theory within the nascent New Private Law movement. Most theorists allied to the New Private Law focus on fundamental private law and so, in turn, bodies of law addressed to singular forms of interaction. Corporations and other compound structures — including trusts, companies, and partnerships — pose an important challenge and opportunity for interpretive theory carried out in the spirit of the New Private Law. These structures entail a compounding of singular forms of interaction with novel elements supplied by organizational law. In the chapter I argue for an integrative model of interpretive analysis of compound structures. I explain what an integrative model of the corporation might look like. I also offer an illustration of the model’s relative advantages by contrasting it with dominant reductive analyses that distort the corporate form by treating it as a mere extension of various singular forms of interaction found in contract, property, and fiduciary law. I offer reinterpretation of core elements of the corporate form — corporate personality, purpose, agency and fiduciary administration - and conclude by showing how an integrative approach promises to shed new light on these elements while revealing interpretive excesses of alternative renderings found in reductive theories of the corporation.

Civil Recourse Theory

This chapter examines civil recourse theory. The phrase “civil recourse theory” has developed two connotations, suggesting: (1) a structural theory of the normative underpinnings of private law liability placing primary emphasis on a plaintiff’s right of redress and the role of the state in affording plaintiffs the power to exact damages from those who have violated the plaintiff’s legal rights; and (2) a distinctive, overarching tort theory that emphasizes a plaintiff’s right of redress while simultaneously emphasizing relational duty in negligence law and torts as legal wrongs. The chapter identifies several other views developed in connection with civil recourse theory but meant to stand apart from it. The thesis that negligence law’s duty of care is relational is among them; so too is the thesis that tort law consists of specifications of legal wrongs, that these wrongs are defined in relatively strict manner, and that plaintiffs must have an injury to prevail on a tort claim. Deploying the narrower conception of civil recourse theory, the chapter defends the principle of civil recourse as a matter of political morality and depicts the place of private rights of action in the basic structure of a just liberal democracy.

Psychology and the New Private Law

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the most promising contributions of psychological methods and insights for private law. It focuses on two related domains of psychological research: cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes, which one might shorthand as “thinking.” Social psychology asks about the role of other people—actual, implied, or imagined—on mental states and human behavior. The chapter is oriented around five core psychological insights: calculation, motivation, emotion, social influence, and moral values. Legal scholarship by turns tries to explain legal decision-making, tries to calibrate incentives, and tries to justify its values and its means. Psychology speaks to these descriptive, prescriptive, and normative models of decision-making. The chapter then argues that psychological analysis of legal decision-making challenges the work that the idea of choice and preference is doing in private law, especially in the wake of the law and economics movement.

Law and Economics

This chapter analyzes how law and economics influences private law and how (new) private law is influencing law and economics. It focuses on three generation or “waves” within law and economics and how they approach private law. In the first generation, many scholars took the law as a starting point and attempted to use economic insights to explain, justify, or reform legal doctrines, institutions, and structures. In the second generation, the “law” at times became secondary, with more focus on theory and less focus on doctrines, institutions, and structures. But this generation also relied increasingly on empirical analysis. In the third generation, which includes scholars in the New Private Law (NPL), there has been a resurgence of interest in the law and legal institutions. To be sure, NPL scholars analyze the law using various approaches, with some more and some less predisposed to economic analysis. However, economic analysis will continue to be a major force on private law, including the New Private Law, for the foreseeable future. The chapter considers three foundational private law areas: property, contracts, and torts. For each area, it discusses the major ideas that economic analysis has contributed to private law, and surveys contributions of the NPL. The chapter also looks at the impact of law and economics on advanced private law areas, such as business associations, trusts and estates, and intellectual property.

Kantian Perspectives on Private Law

This chapter articulates the Kantian approach to private law. It begins by explaining the aims and ambitions of Kantian legal philosophy more generally and, in particular, introducing the Kantian idea that a particular form of thought is appropriate to a particular domain of inquiry or conduct. The chapter situates the Kantian view within a broad natural law tradition. For the part of that tradition that Immanuel Kant develops, the moral structure of natural law is animated by a conception of personal interaction that is so familiar as to be almost invisible. Despite its centrality to both morality and law, in the absence of legal institutions, this natural law is inadequate to its own principles. It requires legal institutions to render it fully determinate in its application consistent with everyone’s independence. It also requires public institutions of adjudication. The chapter further looks at Kant’s “division” of private rights, distinguishing first between the innate right that everyone has simply in virtue of being human and acquired rights that require an affirmative act to establish them. It then goes through the Kantian division of the titles of private right, situating them in relation to the distinction between persons and things. Finally, the chapter articulates the Kantian account of what might be called the naïve theory of remedies—that is, that the remedy is an imperfect continuation of the right that was violated.

Private and Public Law

This chapter explores the relationship between private and public law. In civil law countries, the public-private distinction serves as an organizing principle of the entire legal system. In common law jurisdictions, the distinction is at best an implicit design principle and is used primarily as an informal device for categorizing different fields of law. Even if not explicitly recognized as an organizing principle, however, it is plausible that private and public law perform distinct functions. Private law supplies the tools that make private ordering possible—the discretionary decisions that individuals make in structuring their lives. Public law is concerned with providing public goods—broadly defined—that cannot be adequately supplied by private ordering. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various schools of thought derived from utilitarianism have assimilated both private and public rights to the same general criterion of aggregate welfare analysis. This has left judges with no clear conception of the distinction between private and public law. Another problematic feature of modern legal thought is a curious inversion in which scholars who focus on fields of private law have turned increasingly to law and economics, one of the derivatives of utilitarianism, whereas scholars who concern themselves with public law are increasingly drawn to new versions of natural rights thinking, in the form of universal human rights.

Defenses

This chapter focuses on defenses. A considerable number of theories has grappled with the normative justification(s) for the various claims that arise in private law. This focus on the rights and powers in private law is understandable. After all, without a claim there is nothing much further to discuss. What has gone underexamined are the justifications for the various defenses that exist—the ways of resisting otherwise good claims. Defenses pose a challenge to any monist theory of private law. If private law, or a part of it, is all about efficiency or independence or utility or any other single thing, why not deal with all the elements of what justifies the plaintiff’s claim as an element of the cause of action? Why do people need defenses at all? Either the claim is justified or it is not. On the monist view of private law—that it is only concerned with One Big Thing—what is the need or role for any separate “defenses” that concern countervailing considerations? The chapter then describes what a defense is before looking at pleading and proof and distinguishing between justification and excuse. It also considers the form of reasons and details the general defenses, defenses in contract, defenses to torts, defenses in unjust enrichment, and equitable defenses.

The New Private Law and Intellectual Property

This chapter studies intellectual property (IP). A hallmark of the New Private Law (NPL) is attentiveness to and appreciation of legal concepts and categories, including the traditional categories of the common law. These categories can sometimes usefully be deployed outside of the traditional common law, to characterize, conceptualize, and critique other bodies of law. For scholars interested in IP, for example, common law categories can be used to describe patent, copyright, trademark, and other fields of IP as more or less “property-like” or “tort-like.” Thischapter investigates both the property- and tort-like features of IP to understand the circumstances under which one set of features tends to dominate and why. It surveys several doctrines within the law of copyright that demonstrate how courts move along the property/tort continuum depending on the nature of the copyrighted work at issue—including, in particular, how well the work’s protected contours are defined. This conceptual navigation is familiar, echoing how common law courts have moved along the property/tort continuum to address disputes over distinctive types of tangible resources.

Property

This chapter discusses property law. It considers the idea that property had a “nominalist” ontology, and it was in danger of “disintegration” as a working legal category for that very reason. Nominalism about property has had a significant impact in U.S. case law. The concern here, however, is whether it is a helpful stance to take as a theorist of property. The chapter argues that it is not. There are indeed “high” level abstractions about property which one cannot plausibly do without if one is to understand property rights and property law doctrine. Moreover, the “bundle of rights” (BOR) challenge does not assist one in making sense of these abstractions. The chapter then looks at the conceptual failure of BOR and the New Private Law as it relates to property. BOR is generally regarded as being underpinned by what might be called the Hohfeld-Honoré synthesis. The synthesis rests upon a fairly serious mistake, which is that while the Hohfeldian examination of jural norms is analytic if it is anything, Honor’s elaboration of the incidents making up ownership is anything but—it is functional. This means that Honoré describes the situation of the owner not principally in terms of his Hohfeldian powers, duties, and rights vis-à-vis others, but in terms of the social or economic advantages that an owner has by virtue of his position, and the terms and limitations of those advantages.

Civil and Common Law

This chapter aims to answer the question, “what can the civil law tradition tell us about the New Private Law?” It seeks to do this by offering one civilian's perspective on private law, on U.S. private law, and on the New Private Law. In order to answer that question, it is necessary to say a little bit about what is a civilian perspective, or in other words, what makes a jurist a civilian. This is a question to which many different answers could be given. The chapter then looks at the different perspective that a civilian may have on what is the domain of private law. It also asks what insights the civilian's understanding of the discipline of law may offer to common lawyers. From a civilian perspective, the future of the New Private Law will be interesting indeed.