Università Roma Tre

The course will explore the main fields of private law, such as property, contract, torts and family law - and related legal concepts - from the critical perspectives elaborated by different schools of thought and movements like Legal Realism, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Theories and Queer Legal Studies.
Students will cope with different methods of analysis that unveil the ideology that lies beneath the supposed neutrality and abstraction of private law technicalities. The course ultimately aims at shedding light on the ways in which private law not only affects social, economic and gender relations but also directly and indirectly creates the identity of social actors by establishing the rules of the game and distributing economic resources and symbolic power. To this purpose special attention will be paid to the re-reading of the fundamental institutions of classical legal thought (contract, torts, property and family) offered by critical scholars and particularly feminist legal scholars.

Duncan Kennedy, Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850–2000. In: Trubek DM, Santos A, eds. The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal. Cambridge University Press; 2006:19-73.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, Yale Law Journal , Nov., 1913, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Nov., 1913), pp. 16-59;

Robert L. Hale, Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1923), pp. 470-494;

Morris R. Cohen, Property and Sovereignty, 13 Cornell L. Rev. 8 (1927);

Duncan Kennedy, The Stakes of Law, or Hale and Foucault!, in Kennedy, Du., Sexy Dressing, etc., Harvard University Press, 1993;

Carol Rose, Women and Property: Gaining and Losing Ground, 78 Virginia Law Review (1992), pp. 421-459;

Frances E. Olsen, The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform, Harvard Law Review, May, 1983, Vol. 96, No. 7 (May, 1983), pp. 1497-1578;

Maria Rosaria Marella, The Law of Social Reproduction in Feminists@law, (2023), 12(2).

Duncan Kennedy, Property as Fetish and Tool, Duncan Kennedy on Property, the Commons, and the Law, Grassroots Economic Organizing, May 17, 2017

Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 106, no. 8, 1993, pp. 1710-1745;

Maria Rosaria Marella, The Family Economy versus the Labour Market (or Housework as a Legal Issue), in Conaghan J. and Rittich K., Labour Law, Work, and Family, Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2005, pp. 157-176.

Mary Joe Frug, Rescuing Impossibility Doctrine: A Postmodern Feminist Analysis of Contract Law, 140 University of Pennsylvania Law Review (1992), pp. 1029-1046.

Orit Gan, A Feminist Economic Perspective on Contract Law: Promissory Estoppel as an Example, 28 Mich. J. Gender & L. 1 (2021).

Martha Chamallas, Importing Feminist Theories to Change Tort Law, Wisconsin Women's Law Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 389-394.

Martha Chamallas, Will Tort Law Have its #MeToo Moment? 11 Journal of Tort Law 39 (2018).

Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8, pp. 139-167;

Martha C. Nussbaum, “Whether from Reason or Prejudice”: Taking Money for Bodily Services, The Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 27, No. S2 (June 1998), pp. 693-723;

Brenda Cossman, Sexuality, Queer Theory and 'Feminism After': Reading and Rereading the Sexual Subject (2004) 49 McGill Law Journal 847-876.