Private Law Theory Meets the Law of Work

Hanoch Dagan is 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. Professor Dagan is a former Dean of Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and also served as the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, the director of The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. Among his many publications are over 90 articles in major law reviews and journals, such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review and more. Professor Dagan has also written seven books, including Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011), Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Choice Theory of Contracts (with Michael A. Heller) (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His new book – A Liberal Theory of Property – is forthcoming this year with Cambridge University Press. Professor Dagan has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, and Toronto. Dagan delivered keynote speeches and endowed lectures at Singapore, Alabama, Toronto, Queensland, Cape Town, Monash (Melbourne), and Oxford. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the International Academy of Comparative Law. Dagan obtained his LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School after receiving his LL.B., summa cum laude, from Tel Aviv University.

Michael Heller writes and teaches on private law theory, with a focus on property, contract, and land use.

A leading property theorist, Heller has written several books, including The Choice Theory of Contracts (2017), with Hanoch Dagan, which has been the subject of several conferences, including one at the Law School. His influential book, The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (2008) argues that creating too many property rights can kill markets. He is the editor of the two-volume Commons and Anticommons (2009), and co-editor, with Merritt B. Fox, of Corporate Governance Lessons from Transition Economy Reforms (2006). Heller has also published dozens of articles on legal theory, notably “The Tragedy of the Anticommons” in Harvard Law Review (1998).

At Columbia Law, Heller chairs the Academic Fellows Program, the chief post-graduate teaching fellowship for promising scholars preparing for legal academic careers. He also has served as Vice Dean of Intellectual Life. 

Before joining Columbia Law in 2002, Heller taught at the University of Michigan Law School where he received the L. Hart Wright Award for excellence in teaching. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA School of Law and New York University Law School and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

From 1990 to 1994, Heller worked at the World Bank on post-socialist legal transition and housing reform in Eastern Europe and Russia. He served as a law clerk for Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Sophia Lee is a legal historian whose scholarship synthesizes constitutional and administrative law. She has written about administrative agencies’ role in shaping constitutional law; civil rights and labor advocates’ challenges to workplace discrimination during the early Cold War; and conservative legal movements in the post-New Deal era. Her book, The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press. Her articles can be found in the Yale Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, and Law & History Review. She earned her J.D. and Ph.D. in history from Yale. Prior to joining the Penn Law faculty, she clerked for the Honorable Kimba M. Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Julia Tomassetti is an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong School of Law. She earned a JD from Harvard and a PhD in Sociology from UCLA, where she worked under the mentorship of Distinguished Professor Maurice Zeitlin. She has been a fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy at SUNY Buffalo, and Center for Law, Society, & Culture at the Maurer School of Law. Dr. Tomassetti’s research centers on work law, economic sociology, and the political economy of contemporary capitalism. At present, she focuses on disputes that implicate the legal identity of work relationships. Her recent work examines the relationship between employment and the modern business enterprise, and how information technologies shape legal understandings of labor and corporate legitimacy. Before entering the academy, Dr. Tomassetti practiced campaign finance and employment law in New York City.  

Formerly the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, Richard R.W. Brooks focuses his scholarship on contracts and agency, among other forms of business and social organization. Brooks has published numerous books and articles that analyze behavior through the lens of economics, custom, and law. His most recent book, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms, (coauthored with Carol Rose) examines the history and enduring legacy of racially restrictive property agreements (or racial covenants), which the Supreme Court ruled unenforceable in 1948. Yet despite this repudiation, racial covenants lived on in real estate records, influencing the behaviors of lenders, insurers and realtors, as well as the beliefs and expectations of homebuyers and sellers. Over time the impact of racial covenants would fade, but their legal and social significance lingered well beyond 1948. Racial covenants, even without formal enforcement, were effective signals, creating “common knowledge” that guided the actions of real estate professionals and ordinary buyers and sellers in the housing market.

Brooks’ work also includes articles about contract law and theory, experimental economics, the economics of environmental law, fairness, and perceptions of the legal system.

Brooks holds a BA from Cornell University, an MA from the University of California at Berkeley, a JD from The University of Chicago Law School, and a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at the Law School in 2006 and was most recently the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He also taught previously at Northwestern University School of Law and at Cornell University in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management. Brooks has served as a visiting researcher at the Center in Law, Economics and Organization at the University of Southern California Law School; on an advisory committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economics Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation; and as a research specialist in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

Mark Geistfeld’s primary teaching areas are torts, products liability, and insurance. He has written extensively on a wide range of tort issues, including Tort Law and Alternatives: Cases and Materials (with Robert Rabin and Michael Green, 10th edition, 2016); Products Liability Law (2011); Principles of Products Liability (2nd edition, 2011); and Tort Law: The Essentials (2008). In “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Normative Source of Modern Tort Law,” 91 NYU L. Rev. (forthcoming Dec. 2016), Geistfeld further develops a new interpretation of tort law based on a reciprocity norm of compensation. His scholarship frequently relies on insurance considerations, and he has been an expert witness in insurance-coverage disputes. Before joining the NYU School of Law faculty in 1991, Geistfeld was a litigation associate at Dewey Ballantine, a law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and a litigation associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He received a PhD in economics and a JD from Columbia University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review.

Roy Kreitner teaches courses on private law, legal history, and law and political thought at the law school, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He received an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LL.B. and an M.A. (Comparative Literature & Semiotics) from Tel-Aviv University, and an A.B. from Brown University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press, 2007). During 2009-2010 he was a fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. In 2010-2011 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.

Liam Murphy works in legal, moral, and political philosophy and the application of these inquiries to law, legal institutions, and legal theory. Subjects of his publications range from abstract questions of moral philosophy (for example, the book Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, 2000) to concrete issues of legal and economic policy (such as the book The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, 2002, co-authored with Thomas Nagel). A central theme in all Murphy’s work is that legal, moral, and political theory cannot be pursued independently of one another; they are, in fact, different dimensions of a single subject. This theme is evident in his most recent book What Makes Law (2014), which locates the traditional philosophical issue of the grounds of law (the factors that determine the content of the law in force) within broader issues of political theory. Murphy’s current project expands on his recent Frankfurt Lectures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt: “Private Law and Public Illusion.” This research examines contract, property, and tax law from a practice-based or instrumentalist perspective; it argues that the widespread belief that these domains of law must answer to natural moral rights and obligations is a fundamental theoretical mistake that has a crippling effect on our public political discourse. Murphy has been awarded fellowships at Columbia’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and the National Humanities Center. He has been an associate editor and is now a member of the editorial board of Philosophy & Public Affairs. Murphy was vice dean of NYU School of Law from 2007 to 2010.

Benjamin C. Zipursky is Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where he holds the James H. Quinn ’49 Chair in Legal Ethics and has twice served as Associate Dean (2001-03; 2010-13). He has taught as a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and Vanderbilt Law School. Professor Zipursky is a leading scholar in torts, jurisprudence, and legal ethics, and has published more than sixty articles and chapters on subjects ranging from punitive damages and conflicts of interest in mass tort litigation to the varieties of pragmatism within legal philosophy. He has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad and is the co-author of a leading casebook, TORTS: RESPONSIBILITY AND REDRESS (3d ed. 2012) (with J. Goldberg & A. Sebok) and THE OXFORD INTRODUCTIONS TO LAW: TORTS (2010) (with J. Goldberg).