MSU Law Associate Dean Earns Rave Review for Private Law Article

A review is in and MSU Law Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor of Law David Blankfein-Tabachnick earned high marks. His piece with Kevin Kordana, On Rawlsian Contractualism and the Private Law, was recognized “as one of the best works of recent scholarship relating to tort law,” by Contributing Editor Gregory Keating, USC Gould School of Law Professor, in “Jotwell: The Journals of Things We Like (Lots).”

The piece was published in the Virginia Law Review in November 2022. In the abstract, it states, “Shifts in academic paradigms are rare. Still, it was not long ago that the values taken to govern the private law were thought to be distinct from the values governing taxation and transfer. The conventional, indeed, the nearly universal view of Rawlsianism—the overwhelmingly dominant theory of liberalism and distributive justice—was that the private law lies beyond the scope of Rawls’s two principles of justice.”

In concluding his review, Professor Keating said, “The ‘paradigm shift’ that Blankfein-Tabachnick & Kordana discern is an incipient one. But, as they rightly assert and argue, the change of mind about the relation of tort law (and contract law) to basic justice is real and important. It holds out the promise of revitalizing private law theory and scholarship by reconnecting them with urgent questions of right and responsibility. Blankfein-Tabachnick & Kordana have spent a number of years crying in the wilderness. Now, they have caught the academy’s attention, and for good reason.”