The North American Workshop on Private Law Theory originated in a conversation between Andrew Gold and Paul Miller at Queen’s University. They observed that the academic landscape lacked opportunities for scholarly exchange and community building for private law theorists, especially given that private law theory is heterodox in its methods and normative commitments and given that private law scholarship had been on the wane in the United States for roughly a century. With the rise of the New Private Law in the United States and a longstanding robust scholarly community in private law theory in Canada, they conceived of NAWPLT as a way in which to extend and build scholarly community and dialogue throughout North America. Their proposal for the establishment of NAWPLT won the support of founding organizers and collaborating institutions: namely, John Goldberg (Harvard), Henry Smith (then of Harvard), and the late Stephen A. Smith (McGill). Given the ambition to forge a North America-wide forum, the NAWPLT founders invited Dennis Klimchuk (Western) to join the enterprise as a member of the steering group. Together, the steering group nurtured the growth and eventual expansion of NAWPLT, beginning with the inaugural conference held at McGill in 2013 and extending through subsequent annual conferences hosted by elite law schools in the United States and Canada. The promise held by the original vision for NAWPLT has been reflected in the expansion of the steering committee to include new members – Aditi Bagchi, Molly Brady, Felipe Jimenez, Larissa Katz, Zoë Sinel, and Rebecca Stone – and widened participation by scholars now drawn from across the Americas.
Edition Year Host Institution
I 2013 McGill University
II 2014 Harvard Law School
III 2015 University of Toronto
IV 2016 Fordham University School of Law
V 2017 University of Southern California
VI 2018 Yale Law School
VII 2019 Western Law, Univ. of Western Ontario
VIII 2020 Brooklyn Law School (virtual)
IX 2021 Brooklyn Law School (virtual)
X 2023 UCLA
XI 2023 Rutgers Law School
XII 2025 UC Berkeley
XIII 2025 Allard School of Law, UBC