Legal Theory Workshop: Avihay Dorfman

LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP SERIES

presents 

Avihay Dorfman
Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law 

Market Legality: A Legalistic Social Theory of Markets 

Respondent:  Hamish Stewart 

Friday, February 5, 2016
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park 

My study focuses on the law’s possible impact on the character of market relationships.  I seek to reconsider a prevailing assumption among both liberals and Marxists concerning the character of the typical market interaction: That, in principle, the interacting parties can and should bracket their conflicting moral and political commitments and, so, reduce all questions of value to that of economic value.  My ambition is to criticize this view and develop an alternative account, according to which the legal ordering of market interactions can command a more robust sphere of reciprocal recognition than has been acknowledged.

Avihay Dorfman is a senior lecturer (with tenure) at Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, and a visiting professor, Harvard Law School. He works in the theoretical foundations of private law with particular emphasis on torts and property. He has written articles on various basic questions in private law theory and doctrine as well as on privatization and religious liberty. In each of these studies, Dorfman focuses on the non-instrumental ideas that underlie key legal institutions. In that, his studies elaborate the distinctive implications of the law for the possibility of establishing form of interpersonal recognition among persons. Dorfman is a graduate of Haifa University (B.A. Economics ’04, LL.B. Law ’04) and Yale Law School (LL.M. ’06, J.S.D. ’08). In 2004-2005, he clerked for the Honorable Aharon Barak, the (then) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel.

A light lunch will be provided. 

For more information about this workshop, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.