Email:
N.Sage@lse.ac.uk
Administrative support:
Michele Sahrle
Room: New Academic Building 6.10
Tel.020-7955-6096
Nick Sage joined the LSE as an Assistant Professor in 2015.
Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia Law School. He completed
his doctoral studies, on the theory of contract law, at the University of
Toronto. Nick also has a master's from NYU School of Law, which he attended
as a Hauser Scholar, and bachelors degrees in politics and law from the
University of Auckland. He has worked as a litigation associate at Cravath,
Swaine & Moore, in New York City, and as a judge's clerk at the Supreme
Court of New Zealand.
Research Interests
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Contract
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Property
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Private law theory
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Legal philosophy
'Disgorgement - From Property To Contract' University of Toronto Law Journal
[FORTHCOMING]
The article develops an understanding of the disgorgement remedy in private law by moving between the proprietary context, where the remedy has long been awarded, and the contractual context, where the remedy is relatively new and still controversial. The resulting account can explain the emerging common law on disgorgement for breach of contract, which has so far eluded explanation. The account also has broader implications for private law theory. First, it suggests that asking whether the plaintiff has a right ‘to a thing’ (the paradigmatic sort of property right) may obscure the remedial analysis. Instead, the analysis should attend to another, hitherto overlooked aspect of the plaintiff’s rights: their logical scope. Second, the account suggests that a purely ‘rights-based’ understanding of private law remedies cannot adequately explain disgorgement, because it elides the crucial role that the defendant’s wrongful action plays in the explanation for the remedy.
click here for full
text via SSRN
click here for UTP Journals Online
Response: 'Third-Party Beneficiaries and the Nature of Contract' 90 Tulane
Law Review Online 1 (2016).
In The Puzzle of the Beneficiary’s Bargain, Nicolas Cornell describes a
jurisprudential puzzle concerning contract law’s treatment of third-party
beneficiaries and contends that, to resolve the puzzle, we must radically revise
our understanding of contractual obligation. This Response raises some
difficulties for the revised understanding of contractual obligation that
Cornell proposes. It then suggests an alternative way of resolving Cornell’s
puzzle—one that leaves our ordinary understanding of contractual obligation
intact.
click here for full text via Tulane Law Review
Book Review: 'James Gordley, The Jurists: A Critical History' Modern Law Review
(2015) 78 (2) pp.402-407
'Original Acquisition and Unilateralism' 25 Canadian
Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 119 (2012)
In an original acquisition of property, a person acquires a previously unowned
thing just by taking control of it. Many legal theorists have found original
acquisition problematic because it seems to involve the acquirer "unilaterally"
imposing new constraints upon other persons, who must now respect the acquirer’s
property rights. This article considers the problem of unilateralism from the
standpoint of the Kantian theory of property law articulated by contemporary
legal theorists such as Ernest Weinrib and Arthur Ripstein. The article
considers and rejects these theorists' proposed solutions to the problem of
unilateralism. However, the article proceeds to contend that, from a Kantian
standpoint, there is in fact no problem of unilateralism in the first place.
This is because an original acquisition of property does not constrain other
persons’ “freedom” in the Kantian sense of that term.
click here
for full text
via SSRN
click here for full text via HeinOnline
