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Peter M. Gerhart
Professor

B.A. 1967 (Northwestern), J.D. 1971 (Columbia)
View CV (PDF)
Professor Gerhart was the dean of our law school from 1986 to 1996. A noted expert in antitrust and trade regulation before joining our law school, and later a specialist in international economic law and globalization, Professor Gerhart now specializes in torts, property, and legal theory.
Personal Statement
"My broad project is to explore a unified concept of law that seeks to understand law not by its rules, principles, or concepts but by the non-law justifications (economic, social, and moral) that support one legal outcome over another. I am developing this understanding in the context of private law, while simultaneously working to identify the intellectual and jurisprudential roots that would support or refute this concept of law.

Thus far, I have developed the general unified theory in the context of tort law, which has taken concrete form in my teaching and in a book, Tort Law and Social Morality (Cambridge University Press 2010). Now, I am developing this concept in the context of property law, both in the classroom and in a book that Cambridge University Press will publish in 2013, Property Law and Social Morality. I will soon propose another book in this series, Contract Law and Social Morality. The general thesis is that private law seeks to ensure that each person appropriately takes into account the well-being of others when making decisions. The law is therefore best understood as an institution that recognizes and mandates such other-regarding behavior, based on social values and responsibility for the well-being of others in an interdependent world. When all decisions are made in the appropriate way, all individual decision will be efficient, fair, and stable, so that the community develops norms of coordinated behavior that allow people to achieve their individual projects and preferences in the context of a community of individuals with different projects and preferences.

This project highly influences my teaching, which has resulted in a casebook, Property: Our Social Institution that is ready for publication and that I will use in 2012 as a visiting faculty member at the University of Texas. The detailed table of contents is available here.

My approach to private law integrates deontic and consequential theories by applying justificational analysis to identify the factors, circumstances, and values that shape private law. Drawing on Kantian and Rawlsian philosophy, and on the insights of game theorist Ken Binmore and Herbert Gintis, my first book refocuses tort law on a single theory of responsibility that explains and justifies doctrines as seemingly diverse as negligence, strict liability, and nuisance. Under this theory, tort law asks people to appropriately incorporate the well-being of others into the decisions they make, explains when that duty applies, and explains the scope and limits of that duty. The theory also incorporates a theory of the evolutionary development of social values that people use, and ought to use, in meeting that duty and explains how decision-making from behind the veil of ignorance allows us to evaluate how people act in light of how they ought to act.” "