François du Bois

 My academic journey started at Stellenbosch as an undergraduate decades ago. Going on to study and teach law in the UK, at the University of Oxford and the School of Oriental African Studies respectively, I eventually returned to South Africa in 1995 to work at the University of Cape Town. My main focus throughout was on private law, the law of interactions between private persons, especially the interpersonal obligations arising from contracts and wrongs. I was interested from the start in how the law connects bilateral relations to their broader social context, an issue also highlighted by the ‘horizontal’ application of constitutional rights to private persons in post-1994 South African law. The latter accordingly became a prominent strand in my research and writing, alongside comparative analysis of private law doctrines. That has continued since my return to the UK, where I have been based at the University of Leicester since 2012, supplemented now by research into legal responses to the digital intermediation of social interactions, including in consumer transactions. Methodologically, I have become increasingly troubled by the limitations of Kantian theories of private law, and am now exploring the re-conceptualisation of private law as furthering human flourishing rather than independence.