Christian Burset

Professor of Law

Office: 3101 Eck Hall Of Law
Phone: 574-631-9504
Email: cburset@nd.edu
Staff Assistant: Beth Smith
CV: View

Christian Burset teaches and writes about legal history and civil procedure. His research focuses on the development of English and American legal institutions, including the interaction between law and economic change, the history of arbitration, and the place of specialized courts in the Anglo-American legal tradition. His current book project, under contract with Yale University Press, explores debates in the eighteenth-century British Empire about what kinds of cases and litigants belonged in common-law courts.

Before coming to Notre Dame in 2018, Burset was a Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law and a clerk to the Hon. José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Burset holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law; a Ph.D. in history, also from Yale; and an A.B. in history, with highest honors, from Princeton University.

Courses Taught

• Civil Procedure
• History of the Common Law
• The Rule of Law

Scholarship

An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy (Yale University Press, forthcoming fall 2023)

Redefining the Rule of Law: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study, 70 american journal of comparative law (forthcoming) (peer-reviewed)

A New Report of Entick v. Carrington (1765), 110 Kentucky Law Journal, (with T.T. Arvind)

Advisory Opinions and the Problem of Legal Authority, 74 Vanderbilt Law Review 621 (2021)

Arbitrating the England Problem: Litigation, Private Ordering, and the Rise of the Modern Economy, 36 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 1 (2020)

Quebec, Bengal, and the Rise of Authoritarian Legal Pluralism, in Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire 131–64 (François Furstenberg & Ollivier Hubert eds., McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020)

Why Didn’t the Common Law Follow the Flag?, 105 Virginia Law Review 483 (2019)

Merchant Courts, Arbitration, and the Politics of Commercial Litigation in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire, 34 Law & History Review 615 (2016) (peer-reviewed)

The Messy History of the Federal Eminent Domain Power: A Response to William Baude, 4 California Law Review Circuit 187 (2013)

Areas of Expertise

• Legal History
• The Rule of Law
• Legal Pluralism
• Precedent and Legal Authority