ALI Council Member and Harvard Law School Professor Robert H. Sitkoff took part in Harvard Law School’s “Last Lecture Series.” The series, which is organized by the Class Marshals, asks Harvard Law School professors to give lectures addressing the graduating class. This year’s series also featured ALI member Jeannie Suk.
In his lecture, which was focused on private law as distinguished from public law, Professor Sitkoff told the audience to ‘“Hope for the best; plan for the worst,” as he explained the importance of private law.
Professor Sitkoff explained that public law is “the law that people think about with law; that’s the law that’s on the cover page of the New York Times. But that’s not the law that many of you are going to practice, and that’s not the kind of law that is impactful on people all the time in their interactions with other people, their most fundamental relationships.”
In his talk, Professor Sitkoff reflected back on his own life and how his personal experiences showed him the importance of private law.
“I’m telling you I know—I know in my heart, I’ve lived it—the importance of private law and private ordering for individual lives,” he said. “And in my scholarly life, I found out, it was right in my face, that this really matters. It’s changing the way people organize their lives when we change these rules.”
Sitkoff told the audience that organizations like the Uniform Law Commission and the American Law Institute are particularly important now because they bring together “a national level of experts to pool its understanding of problems and to say, ‘Here’s a new development in practice, in technology or whatever, and here’s how we can change our rules so that people can do their private ordering in an efficacious sort of way.'”
Watch Professor Sitkoff’s lecture.
In addition to serving on ALI’s Council, Professor Sitkoff is an Adviser on Restatement of the Law Third, Conflict of Laws, and Restatement of the Law, Charitable Nonprofit Organizations. He is on the Members Consultative Group for the Project on Sexual & Gender-Based Misconduct on Campus: Procedural Frameworks and Analysis, and Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property.