Hanoch Dagan is the founding Director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. Dagan has written seven books, including A Liberal Theory of Property (2021) and The Choice Theory of Contracts (2017), and has published over 120 articles in major law reviews and journals. Before joining Berkeley, Dagan was the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University. He has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, and Toronto, and delivered keynote speeches and endowed lectures in Singapore, Alabama, Toronto, Queensland, Cape Town, Monash, and Oxford.
Avihay Dorfman is a professor at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. He works in the theoretical foundations of law. He has written numerous articles on a variety of basic questions in private law theory and doctrine as well as on the morality of public ordering, including privatization, public property, and political authority. Dorfman is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk to the (then) Chief Justice Aharon Barak. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Cornell Law School.

• Part I Introduction


• 1: The Law of Just Relationships


• Part II Foundations


• 2: Private Law


• 3: Relational Justice


• 4: Justice in Private Law


• Part III The Familiar Terrain


• 5: Negligence and the Reasonable Person


• 6: Nonfeasance Liability


• 7: Substantive Remedies


• 8: Public Nuisance


• 9: Precontractual Justice


• 10: Good Faith and Related Doctrines


• 11: Restitution


• Part IV Beyond The Familiar


• 12: Regulating Workplace Safety


• 13: The Tort of Discrimination


• 14: Poverty


• 15: Beyond Borders


• Part V Conclusion


• 16: The Promise of Private Law

This book offers an innovative and comprehensive theory of private law as the law governing our relationships with one another in our capacity as private individuals rather than as citizens