Legal Theory Workshop: Property and Desert as the Foundation of Private Law
Join us for Legal Theory Workshop with Prof. (Osgoode).
Prof. Priel will present an essay he is working on: "the purpose of this essay is to offer a general account of the outcomes of seemingly very different court decisions in various areas of private law by showing that what explains these decisions are two relatively independent assessments of the parties to private law litigation. The first is a familiar judgment of the defendant’s fault, the second is the less familiar judgment of the plaintiff’s desert. At a more theoretical level, I will rely on this analysis to challenge one of the popular aspects of corrective justice accounts of private law, the idea that liability in private law depends on the existence of some kind of bipolar relation in which the parties’ respective wrongs and liabilities are the mirror image of each other. My ultimate goal is to argue that the only justification for private law is political, by which I mean the same justification for any other law."
About the speaker
Dan Priel joined Osgoode’s full-time faculty in 2011. Prior to that, he was a Visiting Professor at Osgoode during the 2010-11 academic year and an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick in the UK. From 2005 to 2007, he was Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow-in-Law at Yale Law School, and before that a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation. He served as law clerk in the Israeli Supreme Court, and was co-editor-in-chief of the student-edited law journal at the Hebrew University Law Faculty. His current research interests include legal theory, private law (especially tort law and restitution), and he is also interested in legal history and in the application of the social sciences, in particular psychology, to legal research. His published work appeared in Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and Texas Law Review.
The Workshops
The Legal Theory Workshop Series brings leading scholars from around the world to the Faculty throughout the teaching year to present work-in-progress. All members of the McGill Law community, students and faculty alike, are invited to attend.
