For spring 2022 the Contract Theory and Law Colloquium (at NYU) is jointly convening with Seminar in Private Law (at Yale).
All in-person sessions are held in a single location, some in New York and some New Haven, with remote participation over Zoom open to the public subject to registration.
The sessions will convene throughout the spring term (in February, March and April) on Tuesdays from 12:10 to 2:00pm and during the last four weeks of the spring term on Thursdays from 4:10 to 6:30pm (with a break at 5:30pm to allow people to leave if they wish).
This spring the Colloquium will devote itself to examining the relationship between private orderings and public justice. We hope to explore how private law and the private arrangements that it enables and facilitates—e.g., through contracts, property rights, or corporate law—relate to (public) concerns with justice. This includes examining how public justice goals may be promoted or hampered through private arrangements, questioning the limits of private ordering, and reflecting critically on the interaction between private and public institutions more broadly. Our ambition is to study the subject from both theoretical and empirical perspectives and to engage champions, as well as critics, of private law. As usual the Colloquium will bring together lawyers (practitioners and academics) with scholars from economics, sociology, history, and philosophy among other disciplines. Our invited speakers, their topics, location and dates of their presentations are as follow:
Tuesday Meetings 12:10pm to 2:00pm
1 February
Thomas Piketty & Danielle Allen
A Brief History of Equality. No readings for this session (remote only)
8 February
Gabriella Blum & John Goldberg
Public Nuisance (remote only)
15 February
Ariel Rubinstein
Markets without Prices (New Haven)
22 February
Christopher Kutz & Saskia Sassen
The Privatization of Public Functions (New York)
1 March
Rebecca J Scott & Cynthia Estlund
Labor, Slavery, and the Contemporary Workplace (New Haven)
8 March
Lisa Bernstein & Oliver Hart
Inside and Outside the Firm (New Haven)
28 March
Katharina Pistor
The Law(s) of Capitalism (New York)
5 April
Carol M Rose & Cristina Bicchieri
Social Norms, Customs, and Private Law (New York)
12 April
Marietta Auer
Bargaining with Giants and Immortals
Private Law: Market Ordering or Creator of Injustice? (New Haven)
19 April
Neil Walker & Jeremy Waldron
Sovereignty and climate change
Property and Sovereignty (New York)
26 April
Jeff McMahan, Compensation for Wrongful Life
Wrongful Life (New Haven)
Thursday Meetings in Lester Pollock from 4:10pm to 6:30 pm
31 March
Christine Desan, Harvard
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
7 April Robin Nagle and Andrew Russell, SUNY PolyTech "Maintenance as Essential Work"
14 April Stewart Schwab, Essential Work and Restrictive Employment Agreements
21 April Anthony Appiah and Patricia J. Williams: Pandemic Lessons: The Philosophy of Work and the Modularity of Professional Ethics, Closing Reflection: The Way Forward