The Real Legacy of American Legal Realism

This year's Youard Lecturer in Legal History will investigate the history of modern legal thought. Prof Dagan, an internationally renowned theorist of private law, reflects on historical dimensions of the legal realist movement in the United States and beyond.

Hanoch Dagan is the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and former Dean of Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. He also served as the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, the director of The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. Professor Dagan obtained his LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School after receiving his LL.B., summa cum laude, from Tel Aviv University. Among his many publications are over 70 articles in major law reviews and journals, such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review and more. Professor Dagan has also written six books – Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values (Cambridge University Press, 1997), The Law and Ethics of Restitution (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Property at a Crossroads (Ramot, 2005) (in Hebrew), Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011), Properties of Property (with Gregory S. Alexander; Wolters Kluwer, 2012), and Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013). His new book – The Choice Theory of Contracts (with Michael A. Heller) – is forthcoming (2017) with Cambridge University Press. Professor Dagan has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, University of Michigan, Cornell, UCLA and University of Toronto. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the American Law Institute and of the International Academy of Comparative Law.