Dean's Lecture: Gifts, Fairness, Power and Obligation

Presented by Dean's Fellow, Professor Michele Graziadei, University of Turin

The gift pretends to be an innocent gesture. Wrapped in ribbon, it is a token of affection, an occasion for joy and celebration. In this guise, the gift seems to be a residual presence within the legal order. Yet gifts encompass the full spectrum of human experience and, as such, invariably return to the forefront of legal consideration. Gifts raise fundamental questions of voluntariness, coercion, and fairness, and they trouble the law by disturbing its carefully drawn boundaries between freedom and obligation, personal sentiment and institutional regulation.

As anthropology has long reminded us, gifts are never entirely free. They bind and oblige, they create circuits of reciprocity, and they often are the tangible expression of relations of power and dependence. Law, confronted with these paradoxes, has struggled to find a proper place for the gift: sometimes embracing it, sometimes distrusting it, sometimes devising elaborate doctrinal forms to contain its ambiguities, and to clearly separate self interested and altruistic transactions. Comparative law makes this struggle visible, showing a variety of approaches to the regulation of gifts. Many contemporary aspects of the law reveal deeper concerns about fairness, vulnerability, and the regulation of influence exerted through gifts. Far from being peripheral, then, the gift illuminates fundamental tensions in law itself, showing how beneath its surface autonomy is entangled with dependence, and how values that cannot be measured by market exchange are still part of the contemporary legal landscape.

Michele Graziadei is Professor of comparative private law at the University of Turin. He has broad research interests ranging from comparative law to private law, legal pluralism, and the relationship between law and language, all areas in which he has published extensively in several languages. Professor Graziadei has held visiting posts at Cornell University, the University of Paris II, the University of Lyon III and the University of Luxembourg. He sits on the consultative committee of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, is a titular member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and a full member of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. Among his most recent publications see: ‘Legal Translation and the Quest for Authenticity’ (2025) 38 International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 1 and ‘The Historical Context of Saunders v Vautier’ (2025) 29 Edinburgh Law Review 1 (with Maurizio Lupoi).