Description

In The Humanity of Private Law, Part I (Hart Publishing, 2019), the speaker argued that English private law can best be explained as seeking to help its subjects flourish as human beings, according to a particular vision of what human flourishing entails (which I dubbed ‘the RP’). In The Humanity of Private Law, Part II (Hart Publishing, 2020), the speaker criticises this vision of human flourishing and argues that not only should it be replaced by an alternative vision of what human flourishing entails, but that the future of Western civilisation depends on our urgently making the transition to this different vision of what human flourishing involves. This alternative vision identifies human flourishing not with what one has in one’s life – as the RP identifies human flourishing with someone’s participating in various ‘basic goods’ such as life, friendship, play, marriage, etc – but with the direction in which one’s life is going. Human flourishing, the speaker argues, involves someone’s being engaged in a quest to lead a truthful life (or ‘QTL-ing’, for short). In Part II, he explores what a private law that was concerned to foster our living out such a vision of human flourishing would look like, as well as the conditions that would have to be satisfied before private law could legitimately be reoriented around the promotion of such an ideal of human flourishing.

Please click here for the recorded webinar. 

About The Speaker

Nicholas J McBride writes on private law generally, co-authoring a textbook on tort law (now in its 6th edition) with Roderick Bagshaw, and Key Ideas in Contract Law (Hart Publishing, 2017), as well as numerous articles on various aspects of private law. He is also (with Sandy Steel) the co-author of Great Debates in Jurisprudence, 2nd ed (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), as well as the best-selling introductory book on studying law (now in its 4th edition), Letters to a Law Student. He studied law as an undergraduate and graduate at Brasenose College, Oxford, before becoming a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford for five years. He then became a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1997. He has served as a Cheng Yu Tung Resident Fellow at the University of Hong Kong Law Faculty for the past ten years. He is currently a member of a government-appointed panel conducting an Independent Review of Administrative Law.