Book Title: Interstitial Private Law

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Abstract: The attribution of one person’s act to another is a legal phenomenon that occurs across private law. This chapter presents a survey or overview of the rules by which attribution occurs. Because of the variety of these attributions, and the contexts in which they occur, it is not clear that there is a univocal concept of attribution in private law. In particular, the concept of “representation” is shown not to illuminate the concept of attribution in any clear way. Following this survey, the “metaphysics” of attribution in regard to companies as legal personalities is discussed, and it is argued that there is no need to posit metaphysically suspect artificial agents to explain attribution in the company law context. It is argued that what might be called rules of “relationship attribution,” which focus on the particular relationship the parties are in, provide insight into the phenomenon of attribution.