About the speaker

Roy Kreitner teaches courses on private law, legal history, and law and political thought at the The Buchmann Faculty of Law, at the Tel Aviv Univesrity, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He received an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LL.B. and an M.A. (Comparative Literature & Semiotics) from Tel-Aviv University, and an A.B. from Brown University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press, 2007). During 2009-2010 he was a fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. In 2010-2011 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.

Abstract

Legal scholarship on Global Value Chains (GVCs) has consistently pointed to the limitations of dominant understandings of contract and private law more generally for understanding how GVCs form a system. At the same time, much of that work has been mining contract theory for the intellectual resources to rethink GVC regulation, looking particularly into those branches of theory that provide avenues to conceive of contract unchained from the bonds of privity. This article harnesses those insights and points them in the other direction. Rather than showing that contract theory can adapt and expand to regulate the ostensibly special case of GVCs, it shows that contract theory is deficient at its core, a deficiency highlighted by the centrality of GVCs for today’s capitalism. The idealized image of contract as externality-free is an ideological figuration, providing a distorted account of the production and distribution of resources generally. GVCs are no exception, but rather a particularly accessible example of how contract theory typically conceals, rather than illuminates, the social stakes of existing economic ordering. The article attempts to show that contract theory, even at its most capacious, remains a problematic lens for understanding law’s role in maintaining our current social order.

Registration

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