Description: New Private Law Theory opens a new pathway to private law theory through a pluralistic approach. Such a theory needs a broad and stable foundation, which the authors have built here through a canon of nearly seventy texts of reference. This book brings these different texts from different disciplines into conversation with each other, grouping them around central questions of private law and at the same time integrating them with the legal doctrinal analysis of example cases. This book will be accessible to both experienced and early career scholars working on private law.
Brief description: Stefan Grundmann is Professor at Humboldt-University, Berlin, for Private and Business Law, and at the European University Institute, Florence. He co-founded SECOLA (the Society of European Contract Law) and is president of the European Law School (Berlin/London/Paris/Rome/Amsterdam). His research focus is on contract, banking and company law, on regulation, governance and theory.
Review Quotes: 'Private law tends to suffer, notoriously, both from an identity problem (what exactly is private about private law?) and a form of tunnel-vision (its stakes are merely technical) that disqualifies it as irrelevant in the 'age of the post'. This may be why the most vital contemporary issues, from climate change to financial markets, are entrusted to public-style regulation. This book is a timely proposal to inject interdisciplinarity, pluralism and critical thinking into a 'new private law'. After so much of the world's human and natural resources have been extracted with the often invisible complicity of the 'old' private law, such a move may prove crucial now for the constitution of law's moral economy.' Horatia Muir Watt, Professor at Ecole de droit, Sciences-po