Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law

Paul B. Miller is Associate Professor of Law at the McGill University Faculty of Law. His research focuses on the philosophy of private law, with a particular emphasis on fiduciary law, trusts, and the law of organizations. He is a co-founder of the annual Fiduciary Law Workshop as well as the annual North American Workshop on Private Law Theory.

Andrew S. Gold is the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at DePaul University College of Law. His research focuses on private law theory, contract theory, and fiduciary theory. He has previously held visiting positions at the University of Oxford and at McGill University, and he is a co-founder of the annual Fiduciary Law Workshop as well as the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory.

Contractual and fiduciary relationships are the two primary mechanisms through which the law facilitates coordinated pursuit of our personal interests. These fields are often represented in oppositional terms, and many accept the distinction that contract law allows an individual to pursue their interests independently, while fiduciary law allows an individual to pursue their interests in a dependent or interdependent way. Relying on this distinction, however, seems to suggest that the boundaries between the fields of contract and fiduciary law are fixed rather than fluid.

Bringing together leading theorists to analyse critically important philosophical questions at the intersection of contract and fiduciary law, Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law demonstrates that popular characterizations of the relationship between contract and fiduciary law are overly simplistic. By considering how contract and fiduciary law interact, and not just how they differ, the contributors to this volume offer new insights into a range of topics, including: status relationships, voluntary undertakings, duties of loyalty, equity, employment law, tort law, the law of remedies, political theory, and the theory of the firm.

Bringing together leading theorists to analyse critically important philosophical questions at the intersection of contract and fiduciary law, Contract, Status, and Fiduciary Law demonstrates that these two areas of law, while distinctive, are deeply intertwined.