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The idea of private law

Front Cover
2 Reviews
HARVARD University Press, 1995 - Law - 237 pages

Private law is a familiar and pervasive phenomenon. It applies our deepest intuitions about personal responsibility and justice to the property we own and use, to the injuries we inflict or avoid, and to the contracts which we make or break. The Idea of Private Law offers a new way of understanding this phenomenon. Rejecting the functionalism popular among legal scholars, Ernest Weinrib advances the provocative idea that private law is an autonomous and noninstrumental moral practice, with its own structure and rationality. Weinrib draws on Kant and Aristotle to set out a formalist approach to private law that repudiates the identification of law with politics or economics. Weinrib argues that private law is to be understood not as a mechanism for promoting efficiency but as a juridical enterprise in which coherent public reason elaborates the norms implicit in the parties' interaction. The book combines philosophical exposition and legal analysis, and pays special attention to issues of tort law.

Private law, Weinrib tells us, embodies a special morality that links the doer and the sufferer of harm. Weinrib elucidates the standpoint internal to this morality, in opposition to functionalists, who view private law as an instrument in the service of external and independently justifiable goals. After establishing the inadequacy of functionalist approaches, Weinrib traces the implications of the formalism he proposes for our ideas of the structure, coherence, and normative grounding of private law. Furthermore, the author shows how this formalism manifests itself in the leading doctrines of private law liability. Finally, he describes the public but nonpolitical role of the courts in articulating the special morality of private law.

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Review: The Idea of Private Law

User Review  - Matt - Goodreads

Inside a box lies a duckrabbit of epic proportions, neither larger nor smaller than the very legal system that we inherited from the English common law tradition. Weinrib opens the box, gazes inside ... Read full review

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References from web pages

JSTOR: The Idea of Private Law
The Modem Law Review Ernest J. Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, xii + 237 pp, hb ?27.95. ...
links.jstor.org/ sici?sici=0026-7961(199511)58%3A6%3C916%3ATIOPL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Harvard University Press: The Idea of Private Law by Ernest J. Weinrib
The Idea of Private Law: by Ernest J. Weinrib, published by Harvard University Press.
www.hup.harvard.edu/ catalog/ WEIIDE.html

Boston University School of Law
Speaker, Symposium on Professor Ernest J. Weinrib’s The Idea of Private Law, Eastern Division Meeting, American Philosophical Association, Boston, MA, ...
www.bu.edu/ law/ faculty/ profiles/ fullcvs/ full-time/ simons_k.html

FOUNDATIONS OF PRIVATE LAW
⁶⁸ Ernest J. Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 73, 83. ⁶⁹ ibid. 212–13. ⁷⁰ ibid. 83, 90, 97; Ernest J. Weinrib, ‘Law as a Kantian ...
www.oup.co.uk/ pdf/ 0-19-929167-5.pdf

Book reviews
Weinrib says, on page 31 of The Idea of Private Law, that legal .... The Idea of Private Law is a refreshing reminder of the importance of form to ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/ pdf/ 10.1111/ j.1748-121X.1997.tb00664.x

06405.chp:Corel VENTURA
See, eg, Martin Stone, On the Idea of Private Law, 9 C. ANADIAN. jl & J. URIS . 235 (1996), for. a particularly important contribution to this literature. ...
journals.cambridge.org/ article_S1352325200064053

THE DISTRIBUTIVE FOUNDATION OF CORRECTIVE JUSTICE
In The Idea of Private Law, Weinrib claims that “[w]hereas the category of dis-. tributive justice encompasses different instantiating distributions from ...
www.ucc.ie/ law/ restitution/ archive/ articles/ Distributive_Foundation.pdf

=H1RECONCILING STRICT LIABILITY WITH CORRECTIVE JUSTICE IN ...
See generally Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law, supra note 2. 38. Id. at 63-66. 39. Id. at 144; see also id. at 142-44. 40. See Weinrib, Non-Relational ...
law.fordham.edu/ publications/ articles/ 500flspub8300.pdf

Labour and Intersubjectivity: Notes on the Natural Law of Copyright
Ernest J. Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law(Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1995). 21. Supra, note 15. 22. See Wendy Gordon, "On Owning Information,” ...
papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/ Delivery.cfm/ SSRN_ID275470_code010629530.pdf?abstractid=275470& mirid=1

REVIEW ESSAY: REVISITING STRICT PRODUCT LIABILITY: TAKING LAW AND ...
See also ej Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law(Cambridge,. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) at 145-52 [hereinafter The Idea of Private Law]. ...
www.ohlj.ca/ archive/ articles/ 35_1_richardson.pdf

About the author (1995)

Ernest J. Weinrib is Professor of Law and Special Lecturer in Classics at the University of Toronto.

Bibliographic information

QR code for The idea of private law
TitleThe idea of private law
Rosenthal lectures
AuthorWeinrib, Ernest J
Editionillustrated
PublisherHARVARD University Press, 1995
ISBN0674442121, 9780674442122
Length237 pages
Subjects › 

Law / Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice
Law / General
  
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