About the author

Robert Wai has been a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, since 1998, and has served in a number of governance roles including as associate dean of the law school.  He has university degrees in economics, in international relations, and in law, including an SJD at Harvard Law School. He clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada, and worked at law firms in Vancouver and New York.  His research and teaching explores how the contemporary global economy is constituted and regulated by plural regimes of transnational law. In 2021 he delivered a course on Liberalism and Private International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law, from which his presentation at Amsterdam this fall is developed.

Abstract

The presentation will focus on how liberal political economy addresses the potentially conflictual problems of social valuation in private law through its social theories of potential harmony of interests, both in the domestic and in the transnational context.   The bracketing of difficult issues of conflict of values is clearly a contestable value preference for the fundamental methodological priority of individualism, but it is also premised on a sophisticated social theory about how individual preferences can be aggregated through self-determination and then processes of consensual cooperation, beneficial competition, and welfare assessments based on principles such as liberal rights combined with the harm principle, Pareto efficiency and potential Pareto efficiency.  This approach is especially powerful in a transnational context, where a doubling of the analysis at the inter-sovereign level permits liberalism to both acknowledge the normative and practical importance of sovereign law-making yet also reconcile that to a continued welfare focus on the values of sub-national individuals and groups.  Reform possibilities for such a conception of private law, including for transnational regulation and distribution, are possible but must be framed within this transnational liberal frame.  This framework is difficult to dislodge in the contemporary era as its realism about individual and sovereign power pragmatically bounds the range of alternative normative frames for transnational private law.

Registration 

The lecture will exceptionally be held in the Research Seminar room  (A3.01) and online via zoom. To register online, please click on the button below.