Western Law displays strength in private law at Obligations XI conference
November 11, 2025
Photo LTR: Professors Erika Chamberlain, Jason Neyers, Manish Oza, Joanna Langille, Zoë Sinel, and Stephen Pitel
In July, five Western Law faculty members presented papers at the Obligations XI conference at Harvard Law School, demonstrating the faculty’s strength in private law in a changing world.
Obligations is the premiere private law conference bringing together scholars, judges and practitioners from throughout the common law world. The eleventh edition, titled Private Law: Inside and Out, explored international perspectives on current issues in areas such as contracts, torts, property, equity, unjust enrichment and private law theory.
Professor Zoë Sinel’s paper, “Just Feelings: A Tort Law Theory of Emotions,” is the first chapter of her soon-to-be-complete book of the same name. One of the book’s themes concerns tort law's role in navigating claims for emotional harm in a world that no longer dismisses or diminishes mental suffering and increasingly looks to neuroscience for answers about the nature of emotions and other brain states.
In her paper, “Public Interest and Defences to Defamation: What’s in, What’s out,” Professor Erika Chamberlain addressed the role of the public interest in defences to defamation, and especially how the courts should treat “counter-speech” in controversial debates. In a world where public debate is becoming increasingly polarized and vitriolic, the common law courts may be asked to moderate free expression between parties who hold competing and sometimes unpopular views.
Professor Jason Neyers presented “Agency Law Inside and Out,” which examined the juridical basis for the agency law rule that allows undisclosed principals to sue on contracts to which they are not parties. A proper understanding of that rule will be important to understanding how AI agents might make contracts for their human principals.
In “Inside and Outside the Substance of Private Law: Rethinking the Substance/Procedure Distinction in Choice of Law,” Professor Joanna Langille presented part of a new project on how to use legal theory to rethink the field of private international law, the field which governs cross-border private rights. This area of law is of increasing importance in a globalized economy, where private law transactions ever more frequently cross national borders. Her paper is being published in an edited volume organized by Oxford’s Institute of European and Comparative Law.
Professor Manish Oza’s paper, “Convergence in Property Theory,” addressed why there are two different theoretical justifications of property rights: one based on freedom, and one based on efficiency. Solving this puzzle may have implications for how our theories of property law respond to changes in society and the economy.
The Obligations conference series originated at the University of Melbourne in 2002 and has become a significant international forum for discussion among scholars and practitioners. Western Law was the first North American university to have hosted the conference in 2012 and hosted for a second time in 2024 at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
