Private Law Theory

“… This paper will argue Gerhart largely achieves the goals he set out for himself when he began this project over a decade ago, and that in doing so he captures a melody of reasonableness that runs through much of private law. Gerhart’s goal was to provide a unified account of ‘how we think about’ tort, property, and contract cases that is ‘conceptually coherent’, ‘determinate in its application’, and able to bridge the divide between corrective justice and economic theory. Importantly, the ‘we’ to whom Gerhart refers is more than lawyers and judges. The ‘we’ includes people going about their lives who the law instructs to think appropriately about a decision that involves other people to whom a duty to think appropriately is owed …

Mark P Gergen, Gerhart and Private Law’s Melody of Reasonableness, 72 Case Western Reserve Law Review 355 (2021).

First posted 2022-05-27 15:00:42