About

Robin Kar is Professor of Law and Philosophy and Associate Dean for Curricular Innovation at the University of Illinois College of Law. An award-winning scholar of contract law, privacy, law and technology, and the philosophy of law, he is also the architect and director of the College’s online Master of Science in Law program.

His scholarship has developed in two main phases. His early work in legal and moral philosophy drew on psychology and evolutionary theory to explain how moral and legal systems emerge. It includes The Deep Structure of Law and Morality (Texas Law Review), which won the Society for the Evolutionary Analysis in Law’s 2008 Junior Faculty Prize and led to his later service as the Society’s president (2013–2016). Other work includes The Psychological Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights) and The Two Faces of Morality (NOMOS volume on Evolution and Morality). He also organized a symposium that helped introduce the philosopher Stephen Darwall’s work on the second-person standpoint and accountability into legal scholarship.

Since about 2016, his work has focused on contract law, privacy, and law and technology. Contract as Empowerment (University of Chicago Law Review) offers a general theory of contract that explains many of its traditional doctrines as expressions of an ideal of empowerment and equal respect for persons. His Harvard Law Review work with Margaret Jane Radin on pseudo-contract and shared meaning analysis won the AALS award for best jurisprudence article (2019) and the Wayne LaFave Award (2020). It diagnoses a paradigm slip within contract law: technological changes in communication, especially digital contracting, have left central concepts out of alignment with the doctrines that once realized that ideal.

The Contractual Death and Rebirth of Privacy (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology), written with Xiaowei Yu and winner of the 2026 Carroll Hurd Award for Scholarly Excellence, applies that analysis to privacy policies, showing how the slip undermines privacy, freedom, and democracy and how restoring shared meaning could rehabilitate those ideals. His co-authored CHI paper, Living Contracts, imagines contracts that educate users about their legal rights, translate legal language into plain terms, and surface relevant terms when they are needed.

In 2026, Professor Kar received the University of Illinois’s Outstanding Faculty Leadership Award, described as “the highest accolade honoring a faculty member whose professional service has advanced progress toward the Illinois mission.” He chaired the Provost’s committee on faculty sexual misconduct (2018–2019), whose report led to the campus’s reformed sexual harassment policies, and then the Academic Senate (2019–2022) and the University Senates Conference (2021–2022). In 2022, he chaired the search that recruited the University of Illinois System’s Executive Vice President and was selected as a Fellow of the President’s Executive Leadership Program (PELP). As interim head of Philosophy (2022–2025), he improved the department’s climate, helped restore its national standing, hired seven laterals with no losses, and expanded its curriculum in AI and ethics. Since 2026, as associate dean, he has overseen a $2.4 million Investment for Growth grant to create and launch the College’s online Master of Science in Law program, with seven stackable certificates in areas such as AI privacy and governance, cybersecurity law, and employment law.

Education

PhD University of Michigan
JD Yale Law School
BA Harvard University

Areas of Expertise

Commercial Law
Contracts
Economics and Law
Human Rights
Intellectual Property
International and Comparative Law
Jurisprudence
Legal History
Psychology and Law

Selected Publications

Contract as Empowerment, 83 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW REVIEW 759 (2016).

The Garland Affair: What History and the Constitution Really Say about President Obama’s Powers to Appoint a Replacement for Justice Scalia, 2016 N.Y.U L. REV. ON-LINE FEATURES (2016) (with Jason Mazzone).

Reply to Ed Whelan on the Garland Affair, The National Review: Bench Memos (June 9, 2016) (with Jason Mazzone).

Reply to Michael Ramsey, Originalismblog (June 14, 2016) (with Jason Mazzone).

Coverage in, among other venues, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the American Constitution Society Blog, and the Originalism Blog.

The Evolutionary Game Theoretic Foundations of Law, LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY (forthcoming 2016).

Race and the Law in the Genomic Age: A Problem for Equal Treatment Under the Law, in the OXFORD HANDBOOK OF LAW & TECHNOLOGY (forthcoming 2016) (with John Lindo, University of Chicago Department of Human Genetics).

Against Marriage Essentialism: A Legal Grounding for Obergefell, 2016 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW (forthcoming 2016).

The Art of Promise and Power of Contract, JOTWELL: JURISPRUDENCE (2016).

The Emerging New Life of Contract Studies, Symposium on Contracts ProfsBlog (2014) (Symposium on Omri-Ben Shahar & Carl Schneider’s More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (2014)).

On the Proto-Indo-European Language of the Indus Valley Civilization (and Its Implications for Western Prehistory), in THE SINDHU-SARASVATI CIVILIZATION: NEW PERSPECTIVES (essays in honor of archaeologist Dr. S.R. Rao) (2014) (peer reviewed).

The Psychological Foundations of Human Rights, in OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS (ed. Dinah Shelton, 2013).

Courses

Contract Theory
Contracts
Law Teaching Practicum
Thesis Research

Kar publishes article on living contracts (CHI, September 11, 2026)
Lawless and Kar honored with 2026 College of Law awards for scholarly excellence
Kar honored with 2026 Campus Award for Excellence in Faculty Leadership
Kar publishes new article in Harvard Journal of Law & Technology