Many private law scholars strive to divine broad unified normative theories of property, contracts, torts, and restitution (or, at times, even of private law as a whole). These monist accounts suggest that one regulative principle guides the various doctrines of these complex legal fields or...

This review article examines Robin West's provocative new book Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction. West provides a learned and sophisticated account of the decay of the three major jurisprudential traditions of North American legal theory: natural law, legal positivism, and critical legal...

This Essay examines the possible justification for providing less than full (fair market value) compensation for expropriation. One obvious justification applies in cases of public measures, where the burden is deliberately distributed progressively, namely, where redistribution is the desired...

Peter Benson's “Justice in Transactions: A Theory of Contract Law” is an ambitious book and is likely to become the definite modern statement of the venerable transfer theory of contract. “Justice in Transactions” carefully examines a variety of contract doctrines from formation to...

Much contemporary discussion of “the market” assumes that markets have a true nature or immanent logic. In fact, however, markets arise and operate through law, so that no particular market structure is inevitable and every market order is the result of a complex set of legal and political...

In The Law and Ethics of Restitution (LER) I offered an account of the foundations of (significant parts of) the American law of restitution. I argued that this body of law can, and therefore should, be read as a contextual application of our commitments to autonomy, utility, and community in...

In The Choice Theory of Contracts, we explain contractual freedom and celebrate contract types. This Issue offers penetrating critiques. Here, we reply by refining choice theory and showing how it fits and shapes the contract canon. I. Freedom. (1) Charles Fried challenges our account of Kantian...

This Essay explores the relationship between normative law and economics and legal theory. We claim that legal theory must account for law's coerciveness, its normativity, and its institutional structure. Economic analyses that engage these features are an integral part of legal theory, rather...