The Crises of Private Law

Within the Anglo-American legal world, the claim that private law is in crisis has traditionally been supported on two grounds. The first appears as part and parcel of an historical-cum-sociological story that charts the rise and fall of the conditions that made a coherent private law possible. Such stories can be more or less superficial. They range from fairly cursory discussions of particular segments of private law doctrine, to more ambitious attempts to integrate the development of private law within wider socio-economic and cultural changes, and to the placement of private law within a full-blown sociological account of the nature of contemporary societies, cultures and economies. ¹ The notion of privatisation and its implications for private law will no doubt play an important role in such accounts and it has been taken up in a number of fascinating contributions to this volume. When done well, this kind of account of the crisis of private law – whether or not it invokes the notion of privatisation – raises many stimulating and difficult questions. So many, in fact, that this kind of account will be ignored in what follows.