Hanoch Dagan - Böcker

What makes private law private? What is its domain? What are the values it promotes? Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law addresses these foundational questions in a robust analysis of the key doctrines of private law, including torts, contracts, and restitution.Discarding the vision of private law as a bastion of negative duties of non-interference or efficiency maximization, this book reframes private law in terms of what it calls 'relational justice' - reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. By vindicating self-determination, private law can forge the horizontal interactions vital to the ability to shape and implement a conception of the good life. By structuring these interactions in terms requiring parties to respect one another for who they are, private law can cast them as interactions between equals. In the book's first part, the authors set out a normative position they term relational justice, whereby the rules of private law abide by the fundamental maxim of reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. The second part of the book applies this framework to an analysis of familiar private law doctrinal areas, followed by a third part charting newer areas including workplace safety, poverty, discrimination, and implications for international law. Throughout, the authors show how relational justice theory provides a normative vocabulary for evaluating core features of existing private law, while suggesting directions for necessary or desirable reforms.

Property: Values and Institutions, by Hanoch Dagan, offers an original understanding of property, different from the dominant voices in the field, yet loyal to the practice of property. It rejects the misleading dominant binarism in which property is either one monistic form, structured around Blackstone's (in)famous formula of sole and despotic dominion, or a formless bundle of rights. Instead, it conceptualizes property as an umbrella for a set of institutions bearing a mutual family resemblance. It resists the prevailing tendency to discuss property through the prism of only one particular value, notably efficiency. Dagan argues that property can, and should, serve a pluralistic set of liberal values. These property values include not only autonomy and utility, which are emphasized by many contemporary scholars, but also labor, personhood, community, and distributive justice.Dagan claims that property law, at least at its best, tailors different configurations of entitlements to different property institutions, with each such institution designed to match the specific balance between property values best suited to its characteristic social setting. Dagan develops this theoretical account and applies it to key doctrinal contexts. In particular, he analyzes the normative underpinnings of the doctrines regulating the interactions between landowners and governments (both eminent domain and regulatory takings doctrines) and those regulating the governance of property owned by multiple owners (such as co-ownership, marital property, and the law of common interest communities).

In the myriad choices of interpretation judges face when confronted with rules and cases, legal realists are concerned with how these doctrinal materials carry over into judicial outcomes. What can explain past judicial behavior and predict its future course? How can law constrain judgments made by unelected judges? How can the distinction between law and politics be maintained despite the collapse of law's autonomy in its positivist rendition?In Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory, Hanoch Dagan provides an innovative and useful interpretation of legal realism. He revives the legal realists' rich account of law as a growing institution accommodating three sets of constitutive tensions-power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress-and demonstrates how the major claims attributed to legal realism fit into this conception of law. Dagan seeks to rein in realist descendants who have become fixated on one aspect of the big picture, and to dispel the misconceptions that those gone astray represent the tradition accurately or that realism is now merely a historical signpost. He draws upon the realist texts of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, and others to explain how legal realism offers important and unique jurisprudential insights that are not just a part of legal history, but are also relevant and useful for a contemporary understanding of legal theory. Building on this realist conception of law and enriching its texture, Dagan addresses more particular jurisprudential questions. He shows that the realist achievement in capturing law's irreducible complexity is crucial to the reinvigoration of legal theory as a distinct scholarly subject matter, and is also inspiring for a host of other, more specific theoretical topics, such as the rule of law, the autonomy and taxonomy of private law, the relationships between rights and remedies, and the pluralism and perfectionism that typify private law.

This book is a sophisticated comparative analysis of the doctrine of unjust enrichment in the North American and Jewish legal systems, and in international law. By offering an explanatory theory which brings to light the normative underpinnings of the doctrine, it facilitates the prediction of legal outcomes and supplies the necessary tools for evaluating existing legal rules. Applying both theoretical analysis and comparative legal techniques, the study claims that the choice of compensation arising from a claim of unjust enrichment is not a matter of legal technicality. Instead it describes how the legal choice of a pecuniary remedy can be seen to embody a choice between competing values. This decision, writes Dagan, is implicated in the prevailing background ethos of the society at issue, and is deeply influenced by its own complex conceptions of self and of community.

Dagan's 2004 book provides a dynamic account of the American law of restitution. The book reviews the existing doctrine, using an ethical perspective to expose and examine critically the normative underpinnings of the core categories of restitution. Dagan also discusses some of the most controversial issues in the area, such as cohabitation, improper tax payments, and the role of constructive trusts as trumps in bankruptcy. He further tackles the recent restitution claims of slave laborers (or their descendants) against corporations that benefited from their enslavements, and of governmental bodies against injurious industries. Dagan argues that the concept of unjust enrichment is not an independent reason for restitution but, rather, serves as a loose framework. By integrating doctrinal and ethical analyses of restitution across the spectrum of restitution contexts, the author offers significant and provocative insights on existing law as well as possible reforms.

This highly informative Advanced Introduction explores a range of private law theories, highlighting the ways in which they affect the legal building blocks of social life, with a particular focus on property, contracts and torts.Hanoch Dagan analyses how these leading modern theories function in key social spheres, including the market, workplace, neighborhood and within close relationships. He investigates the contribution of private law theories across a variety of legal fields, such as work law and choice of law, demonstrating the ways in which private law theory can yield significant explanatory and reformist results. In light of rapid technological change, economic globalization and the rise of new forms of family and personal relations, this Advanced Introduction examines and answers emerging challenges and questions in the field.Key Features:Contains concise explanations of a wide variety of influential theoriesProvides both foundational and advanced analysis for readers of all levelsDiscusses current and future concerns such as artificial legal persons, transnational wrongs and structural injusticeScholars and students of law, particularly those interested in property, contracts, torts, private law and legal theory more broadly will greatly benefit from this valuable resource.

This highly informative Advanced Introduction explores a range of private law theories, highlighting the ways in which they affect the legal building blocks of social life, with a particular focus on property, contracts and torts.Hanoch Dagan analyses how these leading modern theories function in key social spheres, including the market, workplace, neighborhood and within close relationships. He investigates the contribution of private law theories across a variety of legal fields, such as work law and choice of law, demonstrating the ways in which private law theory can yield significant explanatory and reformist results. In light of rapid technological change, economic globalization and the rise of new forms of family and personal relations, this Advanced Introduction examines and answers emerging challenges and questions in the field.Key Features:Contains concise explanations of a wide variety of influential theoriesProvides both foundational and advanced analysis for readers of all levelsDiscusses current and future concerns such as artificial legal persons, transnational wrongs and structural injusticeScholars and students of law, particularly those interested in property, contracts, torts, private law and legal theory more broadly will greatly benefit from this valuable resource.

This concise landmark in law and jurisprudence offers the first coherent, liberal account of contract law. The Choice Theory of Contracts answers the field's most pressing questions: what is the 'freedom' in 'freedom of contract'? What core values animate contract law and how do those values interrelate? How must the state act when it shapes contract law? Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller - two of the world's leading private law theorists - show exactly why and how freedom matters to contract law. They start with the most appealing tenets of modern liberalism and end with their implications for contract law. This readable, engaging book gives contract scholars, teachers, and students a powerful normative vocabulary for understanding canonical cases, refining key doctrines, and solving long-standing puzzles in the law.

Modern statesmen and political theorists have long struggled to design institutions that will simultaneously respect individual freedom of religion, nurture religion's capacity to be a force for civic good and human rights, and tame religion's illiberal tendencies. Moving past the usual focus on personal free expression of religion, this illuminating book - written by renowned scholars of law and religion from the United States, England, and Israel - considers how the institutional design of both religions and political regimes influences the relationship between religious practice and activity and human rights. The authors examine how the organization of religious communities affects human rights, and investigate the scope of a just state's authority with respect to organized religion in the name of human rights. They explore the institutional challenges posed by, and possible responses to, the fraught relationship between religion and rights in the world today.

Property enhances autonomy for most people, but not for all. Because it both empowers and disables, property requires constant vigilance. A Liberal Theory of Property addresses key questions: how can property be justified? What core values should property law advance, and how do those values interrelate? How is a liberal state obligated to act when shaping property law? In a liberal polity, the primary commitment to individual autonomy dominates the justification of property, founding it on three pillars: carefully delineated private authority, structural (but not value) pluralism, and relational justice. A genuinely liberal property law meets the legitimacy challenge confronting property by expanding people's opportunities for individual and collective self-determination while carefully restricting their options of interpersonal domination. The book shows how the three pillars of liberal property account for core features of existing property systems, provide a normative vocabulary for evaluating central doctrines, and offer directions for urgent reforms.

Property enhances autonomy for most people, but not for all. Because it both empowers and disables, property requires constant vigilance. A Liberal Theory of Property addresses key questions: how can property be justified? What core values should property law advance, and how do those values interrelate? How is a liberal state obligated to act when shaping property law? In a liberal polity, the primary commitment to individual autonomy dominates the justification of property, founding it on three pillars: carefully delineated private authority, structural (but not value) pluralism, and relational justice. A genuinely liberal property law meets the legitimacy challenge confronting property by expanding people's opportunities for individual and collective self-determination while carefully restricting their options of interpersonal domination. The book shows how the three pillars of liberal property account for core features of existing property systems, provide a normative vocabulary for evaluating central doctrines, and offer directions for urgent reforms.

This concise landmark in law and jurisprudence offers the first coherent, liberal account of contract law. The Choice Theory of Contracts answers the field's most pressing questions: what is the 'freedom' in 'freedom of contract'? What core values animate contract law and how do those values interrelate? How must the state act when it shapes contract law? Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller - two of the world's leading private law theorists - show exactly why and how freedom matters to contract law. They start with the most appealing tenets of modern liberalism and end with their implications for contract law. This readable, engaging book gives contract scholars, teachers, and students a powerful normative vocabulary for understanding canonical cases, refining key doctrines, and solving long-standing puzzles in the law.

Modern statesmen and political theorists have long struggled to design institutions that will simultaneously respect individual freedom of religion, nurture religion's capacity to be a force for civic good and human rights, and tame religion's illiberal tendencies. Moving past the usual focus on personal free expression of religion, this illuminating book - written by renowned scholars of law and religion from the United States, England, and Israel - considers how the institutional design of both religions and political regimes influences the relationship between religious practice and activity and human rights. The authors examine how the organization of religious communities affects human rights, and investigate the scope of a just state's authority with respect to organized religion in the name of human rights. They explore the institutional challenges posed by, and possible responses to, the fraught relationship between religion and rights in the world today.