The North American Workshop on Private Law Theory (NAWPLT) is a yearly forum for scholars to present and discuss work that takes private law seriously as such – as “private” and as “law.” To take private law seriously is not to accept it uncritically, and many kinds of theorizing fall within the ambit of NAWPLT. What these modes of theorizing have in common is that they contribute to reinvigorating the study of private law in the face of trends tracing back at least to Legal Realism that tend to dissolve private law into public law or into fields beyond law such as economics or sociology.
As a subject matter, “private law” encompasses traditional common law subjects such as Property, Contracts, and Torts, as well as adjacent subjects, such as intellectual property and commercial law. Private law also includes core areas receiving renewed attention, such as unjust enrichment, equity, and remedies. At a theoretical level, the term “private law” gestures toward an elusive but important cluster of distinctions between what is public and what is private. Such distinctions need not imply a radical autonomy of private law or the implications that are sometimes drawn from such a view.
Scholars participating in NAWPLT take the internal perspective on private law seriously – that is, they take the concepts of the law and the perspective of participants in the legal system on their own terms as a springboard for theorizing. Some adopt an almost exclusively internal perspective, stressing coherence and highlighting local forms of justice like corrective justice as immanent in the law. Others combine the internal and external, explaining the concepts of private law and their interrelations in the light of their function. Most such perspectives allow for a great deal of critique of the law as it is, but they all eschew a radical skepticism or reductionism toward private law. Realist and post-Realist scholarship that engages with doctrine and grapples with the internal perspective can also find a home in NAWPLT.
The overall aim of NAWPLT is to offer a new set of perspectives on time-honored territory by harnessing interdisciplinary analysis in the service of a project of interpretive reconstruction of the private law.