LL4EF Half Unit
Key Issues in Private Law
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Dr Nicholas Sage
Availability
This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process.
First come first served basis, with a waitlist. LLM and MSc Law & Finance students given priority.
This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.
This course has a limited number of places and we cannot guarantee all students will get a place.
Course content
Private law—the law that governs private interactions, including contract, torts or civil wrongs, property, and unjust enrichment—is fundamental to our legal system, supplying many of its basic legal concepts.
Private law shapes all relationships between individuals, and between businesses, as well as the character of our economy and society more broadly.
This course will explore some of private law’s most important ideas. We will examine a variety of current legal controversies, for example concerning the defence of economic duress in contract law, and the scope of the duty of care owed by individuals and businesses in tort law. We will also consider more general principles and themes that run across the whole of private law—such as how to analyse legal rights, and the connections between legal and moral responsibility. Students will emerge with a deeper appreciation of the nature and function of private law and its most interesting and controversial doctrines.
The course should be valuable both for students from civil law systems who are looking to learn more about the common law, and for common lawyers seeking to enhance their understanding of their legal system’s foundations.
The topics covered will vary from year to year but will address issues such as the following:
- Contract formation rules
- Contractual defences such as duress and misrepresentation
- Liability for economic loss in tort law
- Economic and rights-based theories of tort law
- Principles of property acquisition and creation
- General theories of moral responsibility and legal liability
Teaching
20 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
Formative assessment
Essay (2000 words)
Indicative reading
Charles Fried, Contract as Promise (Harvard UP 1981)
Pakistan International Airlines v Times Travel [2023] AC 101
Guido Calabresi, The Costs of Accidents (Yale UP 1970)
Hedley Byrne & Co Heller & Partners [1964] AC 465
Thomas W Merrill & Henry E Smith, ‘Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property’ (2000) 110 Yale LJ 1
Assessment
Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period
Key facts
Department: LSE Law School
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
Total students 2024/25: Unavailable
Average class size 2024/25: Unavailable
Controlled access 2024/25: NoCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
Personal development skills
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Commercial awareness