Recent large scale transnational transfers of land threaten members of rural communities in the developing world who rely for food and shelter on access to land they lack formal title to. Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom, this Essay argues that liberal property theory provides...

By way of an alternative to the failed project of codifying private law for the European Union, a socio-legal account of the effects of EU legal integration on private law in Europe describes the emergence of European Regulatory Private Law (ERPL). ERPL offers a coherent conception of this vast...

Gregory Alexander's new book The Global Debate over Constitutional Property provides a unique opportunity to reflect upon the functions of comparative law and the nature of ownership. This Comment highlights the role of comparative law in upsetting law's tendency to turn contingency into...

The thesis of this essay is that, like the other branches of private law, the law of restitution and unjust enrichment is by and large autonomy-enhancing and therefore complies with the liberal conception of just relationships. Like the traditionalist view of private law, this account of private...

When should specific performance be available for breach of contract? This question has engaged generations of legal economists and philosophers, historians and comparativists. Yet none of these disciplines have provided a persuasive answer. This Article provides a normatively-attractive and...

This Article explores the normative foundations of the rules governing mutual mistake, impossibility, impracticability, and frustration and studies their doctrinal implications. These familiar doctrines, which make contracts voidable or excusable whenever they are grounded on a shared basic...

This article argues that a liberal theory of property rights can help us resolve a century old debate about a foundational aspect of the trust, namely, the nature of the beneficiary’s interest. According to orthodoxy, the beneficiary has a (weak form) of proprietary right to the trust res. But...

This Article focuses on relational contracts whose performance implicates the person of the promisor (as where the promisor is the promisee’s employee). We seek to study how people perceive these types of long-term commitments. Our question, more specifically, is whether their beliefs that...

Autonomy-based theories of contracts tend to ascribe a rather modest role to the law and to conceptualize contract law as a unified body of doctrine governed by one regulative principle. But if autonomy stands for the commitment that people should, to some degree, be the authors of their own...

Contract is one of the key tools liberal law employs in the service of its core mission of enhancing people’s autonomy, and choice theory conceptualizes this task as contract’s telos. It thus prescribes three principles – proactive facilitation, regard for the future self, and relational...