Book review by Gonçalo de Almeida Ribeiro, The Decline of Private Law: A Philosophical History of Liberal Legalism, Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2019

Abstract

Gonçalo de Almeida Ribeiro’s book The Decline of Private Law: A Philosophical History of Liberal Legalism, presents the evolution of liberal legalism, understood as the doctrine that, based on the «elective affinities» between liberalism and legalism, presents lawyers as the guardians of liberal rationality. The decline of private law is a product from its growing dissociation from Kant’s liberal political theory, in what is perhaps the most successful recent attempt at a philosophy of the history of modern private law.