Roy Kreitner

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Roy Kreitner teaches contracts, jurisprudence, and commercial law at the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on private law theory, the legal history of contracts, and the history and theory of money. He is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press, 2007), which won the American Society for Legal History’s 2007 Cromwell Book Prize.

At Radcliffe, Kreitner will work on a book about the legal and political history of money in the United States from the Civil War to World War I. The project links the transformation in legal and popular conceptions of money with the rise and then virtual disappearance of monetary policy as an issue for electoral politics. Late-nineteenth-century Americans struggled through the political process over whether money would be based on gold, silver, or government fiat, whereas early-twentieth-century Americans learned to view monetary policy as a realm in which technical expertise and, thus, neutrality would yield optimal arrangements. Kreitner focuses on the movement to insulate money from popular politics and asks how shifts in the meaning of money transformed the experiences of democracy, politics, and self-government.

Kreitner, who earned his SJD at Harvard University, has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council for Higher Education in Israel, the Israel Science Foundation, the European Union’s TMR Network Project on European Private Law, and the Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund at Harvard Law School.