Ernie's Three Worlds

This article is the text of an introductory address presented at the Faculty of Law on 23 October 2009 in celebration of Professor Ernest Weinrib's receiving the 2009 Killam Prize, Canada's most distinguished annual award for outstanding scholarly achievement. It offers a very personal interpretation of the contributions that Weinrib has made to private-law scholarship over the last thirty years and is organized around three closely related questions that he has addressed in his work: What is a theory? What is a theory of law? and What is a theory of private law? His answers to these different questions land Weinrib in three different worlds – the world of the university, the world of the law school, and the world of legal practice – but it is Weinrib's special contribution as a legal philosopher to have brought all three much closer together.