Research Expertise and Interest

contract and commercial law, jurisprudence, property

Research Description

Hanoch Dagan is the Elizabeth J. Boalt Distinguished Professor of law at Berkeley Law and the founding Director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory.

Professor Dagan writes and teaches primarily in the areas of private law theory, contracts, property, and legal theory. Among his many publications are over 120 articles in major law reviews and journals, such as Yale Law Journal, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, and more. Dagan is the author of seven books, including Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011), Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013), The Choice Theory of Contracts (with Michael A. Heller) (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and A Liberal Theory of Property (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He edited six book, including Properties of Property (Wolters Kluwer, 2012) (with Gregory S. Alexander) and Research Handbook on Private Law Theory (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) (with Benjamin Zipursky). Dagan’s latest book, Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law (2024; with Avihay Dorfman) just came out with Oxford University Press.

Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Professor Dagan was the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University. Professor Dagan is also a former Dean of TAU’s Faculty of Law and served as the founding Director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, the Director of The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law.

Professor Dagan has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, and Toronto. Dagan delivered keynote speeches and endowed lectures at Singapore, Alabama, Toronto, Queensland, Cape Town, Monash (Melbourne), and Oxford. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the International Academy of Comparative Law.