Liberal Political Authority and Private Right

Speaker: Dr Arie Rosen, University of Auckland

Join us in person or via Zoom: https://uqz.zoom.us/j/88141862805

Much of contemporary private law theory insists that the “privateness” of private law entails a sui generis, apolitical normative purpose for this field, different from the normative purposes that we find elsewhere in the law. This is sometimes used to explain the sui generis mode of the production of private law, which, it is claimed, owes more to judicial law-making than to modern democratic processes. In this chapter, I argue against this traditional approach. I defend the claim that contract law and private law more generally are exercises of political authority and that this constitutes the principal context for evaluating and interpreting them. What we expect of private law depends primarily on what service we expect political authority to provide for us. These expectations lead to substantive and procedural standards with which we can evaluate private law and its production. I defend the claim that, within a liberal framework, what makes private law special is not its purpose and value, but the space it creates for its subjects to be motivated by their private reasons within their rights. A commitment to preserving this space, I show, does not entail relinquishing the pursuit of other goals, such as distributive and social justice. This last insight also entails a re-evaluation of the modes of production appropriate for this part of the law.

About the Speaker

Arie Rosen is a legal theorist based at the University of Auckland Faculty of Law and a founding co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Legal and Political Theory. Before joining Auckland, he studied law and philosophy at New York University and was an Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice. His work in legal and political philosophy focuses on political authority, the grounds for its exercise, the ideology that sustains it, and the impact it has on law and practical reasoning. His work appears in various edited volumes and leading journals, including Legal Theory, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the University of Toronto Law Journal, Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence. His current project focuses on how political authority is exercised in the context of private law and what this can teach us about constitutional structures and the core commitments of liberal political morality.

Read Dr Arie Rosen's biography and publications