UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Private Law Theory recently hosted the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory for the first time, welcoming a stellar group of scholars from around the world to discuss research works in progress.
The workshop’s 11th annual meeting included the revival of its John G. Fleming Award, given to University of Toronto Professor Ernest Weinrib for his contributions to tort law. His Fleming Lecture, on the seminal torts case Vincent v. Lake Erie Trans. Co., “ranged from Aristotle, to scholastic natural law, to the modern principle of proportionality,” says UC Berkeley Professor Mark Gergen, who served as a co-host for the meeting with Professor Hanoch Dagan, the founding director of the Center for Private Law Theory.
The conference was “a great success,” Gergen says, with “extended discussions of six papers on a broad range of subjects, including the function of equity in modern law, the tort of interference with contract, how we should think about differences in legal systems, the standards that govern fiduciaries, how Lon Fuller’s theory of forms can contribute to understanding intellectual property, and the law and principles that apply when government infringes on people’s rights as a matter of necessity.”
In addition to Dagan and Gergen, colleagues José Argueta Funes, Andrew Bradt, Seth Davis, Melvin Eisenberg, Christopher Kutz, and Molly Van Houweling joined the event, along with a number of postdoctoral fellows at the law school and Ph.D. students from the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program.