Private law structures the legal building blocks that most profoundly affect our social and economic life — notably property, contract, and torts as well as central aspects of family law, trust law, work law, and more. It thus governs our relationships with each other in arguably the most important spheres of our lives: in the market, the workplace, the neighborhood, and intimate relations.
The Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory promotes interdisciplinary research on these themes. We organize a variety of activities designed to stimulate dialogue, exchange and advance knowledge, explore new ideas, and foster insights into the legal building blocks of our social and economic life and contribute to making them fair and just.
From a Supreme Court justice’s visit and an innovative leadership initiative to impactful pro bono work and influential AI guidance, the school’s commitment to excellence, community, and public mission was on full display.
Co-authored with Avihay Dorfman, Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law argues that private law should, and to a significant degree already does, abide by two fundamental commitments: reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality.
From helping to write a tribe’s constitution to providing free training worldwide on digital investigations of human rights violations to propelling crypto industry reform, the school had quite a year.
A world-renowned scholar, Dagan will guide the center’s work investigating how we define our property, contract, and tort rights — and how that defines us as a society.
“The quality of any educational institution is largely determined by the quality of its faculty and we simply could not have had a better year in our hiring,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says.