Private Law: Contract, Tort & Property

Watch

• Hospitality Law video documentary on common law and hotel Liability ↗Danielle Smith
• Tort Law in 3 Minutes ↗What Is Law Even
• Advanced introduction to Private Law ↗Law Blogs Maastricht
• Law of Torts Meaning and Elements of Tort in Telugu Advocate Sowjanya hyderabad ↗Advocate Sowjanya
• Inside the Classroom: Contracts With Professor George Geis ↗University of Virginia School of Law
• Contract Law in Two Hours ↗Anthony Marinac

Read

• The Common Law ↗An indispensable historical and philosophical treatise, this work illuminates the foundational principles of contract, tort, and property that underpin Anglo-American jurisprudence.Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
• The Death of Contract ↗A concise, provocative critique, this book challenges the classical theory of contract, arguing for its historical contingency and the rise of alternative legal paradigms.Grant Gilmore
• The Problem of Social CostThis seminal article fundamentally reshaped the economic analysis of law, demonstrating how transaction costs and property rights dictate efficient resource allocation and liability.Ronald Coase
• Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation ↗A rigorous philosophical defence, this work posits that contract law's moral force derives from the fundamental human act of promising, offering a compelling counter-narrative to purely economic views.Charles Fried
• Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Modern Property Law ↗This collection of essays offers a nuanced exploration of property law, revealing its social, historical, and rhetorical complexities beyond mere economic efficiency or doctrinal rules.Carol Rose

Voices to follow

• Richard Posner ↗A towering figure in law and economics, his work offers a rigorous, often provocative, analytical lens on the efficiency and implications of private law doctrines.Former Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School
• Guido Calabresi ↗A seminal thinker in tort law, he reshaped understanding of accident liability and risk distribution through his pioneering economic analysis.Former Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; Sterling Professor Emeritus, Yale Law School
• Cass Sunstein ↗His extensive scholarship, blending behavioural economics with legal theory, provides fresh insights into the design of contracts, the rationale for torts, and the regulation of property.Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School
• Martha Nussbaum ↗Her influential work on human capabilities and justice offers a profound ethical framework for examining the moral underpinnings and societal impact of private law.Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago
• Robert Cooter ↗A leading voice in the economic analysis of law, he provides sophisticated models for understanding the incentives and outcomes shaped by contract, tort, and property rules.Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

Glossary

• AcceptanceAcceptance is when the person who received an offer clearly agrees to all the terms of that offer. Once an offer is accepted, a contract is usually formed. For example, if your friend offers to sell you their video game for 500 rupees, and you say, "Yes, I'll buy it," that's acceptance.
• Breach of ContractA breach of contract happens when one person or group in a contract fails to do what they promised to do. This means they've broken the agreement. For example, if you agreed to paint your neighbour's fence by Saturday, but you don't do it, that's a breach of contract.
• ContractA contract is a formal agreement or promise between two or more people or groups that the law will enforce. It means everyone involved has agreed to do something specific, and if they don't, there can be legal consequences. For example, when you buy a new phone, you enter into a contract with the store where you agree to pay money, and the store agrees to give you the phone.
• DamagesDamages are the money that a court orders one person to pay to another person to make up for harm or loss they caused. It's meant to put the injured person back in the position they were in before the harm happened. For example, if someone damages your bicycle, the damages they pay might cover the cost of repairing or replacing it.
• LeaseA lease is a contract that allows one person to use another person's property, usually for a set period, in exchange for regular payments. It's common for renting homes or cars. For example, when your family rents an apartment, they sign a lease agreement with the landlord, agreeing to pay rent each month to live there.
• LiabilityLiability means being legally responsible for something, especially for causing harm or for failing to meet an obligation. If you are liable, you might have to pay damages or face other legal consequences. For example, if you borrow your friend's book and accidentally spill water on it, you might be liable for replacing it.
• NegligenceNegligence is a type of tort where someone acts carelessly and their carelessness causes harm to another person. It means they didn't take reasonable care to prevent harm. For example, if a shop owner doesn't clean up a spill on their floor and a customer slips and gets hurt, that could be negligence.
• OfferAn offer is when one person suggests a deal or a promise to another person, showing they are ready to enter into a contract if the other person agrees. It's the first step in forming an agreement. For example, if your friend says, "I'll sell you my old video game for 500 rupees," that's an offer.
• OwnershipOwnership is the legal right to possess, use, control, and transfer something. When you own something, you have the main say over what happens to it. For example, if you bought a new video game with your own money, you have ownership of that game.
• PropertyProperty refers to anything that a person or group legally owns. This can include physical things like land, houses, cars, and personal belongings, as well as less tangible things like ideas or inventions. For example, your school bag, your bicycle, and the house you live in are all examples of property.
• TortA tort is a civil wrong, meaning an action that causes harm or injury to another person or their property, but isn't a crime. The person who caused the harm might have to pay money to the injured person. For example, if someone accidentally spills a drink on your expensive new shoes and ruins them, that could be a tort.

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Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Genetic Engineering & CRISPR Health

  There's an old legal rule: you can't own a fact of nature, like gravity or a river. Then companies started patenting genes, chunks of DNA that already sit inside every one of us. Suddenly courts had to ask a weird question: can someone own a piece of code that's literally in your own body?

• Causal Inference & Experiments Mathematics

  When a court asks 'did the driver's texting cause the crash?', it uses the 'but-for' test: would the crash still have happened if he hadn't been texting? That means imagining a parallel world where he kept his eyes on the road. Statisticians do the exact same thing to prove cause and effect, comparing our world to the one that didn't happen.

• Biotechnology Science

  If you tweak a bacterium in a lab so it eats oil spills, is it now your property, like a gadget you built? A living thing that can grow and multiply on its own? Biotech dragged courts into a bizarre new question: can you actually own life itself?

• Borders and Geopolitics Geography

  There's a law that says if you squat on land long enough and the owner never fights it, the land becomes yours, 'adverse possession,' the thing behind backyard fence disputes. Now scale that up: a country that conquers land and rules it long enough eventually gets the world to accept the claim. It's squatter's rights for whole nations.

• Philosophy of Language Literature

  Every contract is a giant bet that words reliably grab onto real things, that 'deliver 100 chairs by Friday' means one clear thing to both sides. Lawsuits are what happen at the exact spots where that bet fails, where a word turns out to mean two things. Courtrooms are basically philosophy classes about whether language actually connects to the world, with money on the line.

• Credentialing & the Future of School Education

  When the government requires a license to work in a job, that license becomes something you own, like property, and it keeps competitors out. That's artificial scarcity backed by law. Today's 'you must have this degree' rules are the direct grandchildren of medieval guilds that monopolized who was allowed to work.

• Cryptocurrency & Digital Money Economics

  Crypto fans say 'code is law': instead of a promise a court can enforce, a program automatically does the deal for you. Sounds perfect, until a bug in one such program (called The DAO) drained millions of dollars, and everyone had to ask: does the code rule, or what people meant to happen?

• Work, Automation & the Gig Economy Economics

  The entire app-driver economy hangs on one legal word: are you an 'employee' or a 'contractor'? That single label decides whether the company owes you minimum wage, benefits, and protection if you get hurt. That's exactly why companies like Uber fight it harder in court than almost anything else.

• Internet Censorship Media

  You think you have free speech online, but on Instagram or YouTube your real rights come from the Terms of Service you tapped 'agree' on, not from any constitution. That means the biggest space for public speech on Earth runs on a private company's contract. No bill of rights is protecting your post.

• Carbon Markets & Net Zero Environment

  Cap-and-trade invents a brand-new thing to own: the right to release a ton of pollution into the sky. Then it hands those rights out and lets people buy and sell them. In a way, it fences off a piece of the shared air we all breathe and turns it into private property, all disguised as a clever market fix.

• Plastic Pollution Environment

  To sue someone, you normally need a specific culprit and a specific injury: this person hurt me, right here. But microplastics come from everywhere, harm slowly, and can't be pinned on anyone. The law is left holding a case with literally no one to sue.

• Personal Finance & Money Skills Economics

  In the CFPB’s US mortgage example, a promissory note records the borrower’s promise to repay, while the security interest gives the lender rights against the property if the agreement is breached. A household borrowing decision thus combines cash-flow planning with contractual obligations and property rights.

  Sources: CFPB — Promissory note explainer ↗ · CFPB — What is a security interest? ↗