Staff profile

Irina Sakharova is an Assistant Professor in Commercial Law at Durham Law School, where she is also a member of the Institute for Commercial and Corporate Law and of the Durham Centre for Law and Philosophy. She teaches contract law and legal philosophy and has been convening the undergraduate contract law module.  

Dr Sakharova’s research is situated in private law and legal philosophy, and most centrally in contract law, contract theory, and comparative contract law, and is currently focused on the nature of contractual rights and persons’ power to contract. She is also particularly interested in the intersections between contract and property, on the one hand, and between contracts and other obligations, on the other hand. 

Dr Sakharova earned her MJur degree from the University of Oxford, where she was a Hill Foundation Scholar and an Associate Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal. She completed a PhD under the supervision of Professor James Penner at NUS Law, where she was a Graduate Research Scholar and then an NUS President’s Graduate Fellow. Her PhD thesis, Understanding the Legal Power to Contract, was awarded the Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize for the Best PhD Thesis in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

• Contract Law
• Private Law Theory
• Jurisprudence
• Moral Philosophy
• Comparative Law

Book review

• Contract Before the Enlightenment: The Ideas of James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, 1619-1695, by Stephen Bogle
  
  Sakharova, I. (2024). Contract Before the Enlightenment: The Ideas of James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, 1619-1695, by Stephen Bogle. Law Quarterly Review, 2024(140), 477-480.

Chapter in book

• Contract Law
  
  Sakharova, I. (in press). Contract Law. In D. Kysar & E. Lim (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law. Oxford University Press.
• Contract as Expectation and the Puzzle of Present Exchange
  
  Sakharova, I. (in press). Contract as Expectation and the Puzzle of Present Exchange. In P. B. Miller & J. Oberdiek (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory: Volume III. Oxford University Press.
• The Bilaterality of Contract
  
  Sakharova, I. (2025). The Bilaterality of Contract. In M. Chen-Wishart & P. Saprai (Eds.), Research Handbook on the Philosophy of Contract Law (pp. 178-191). Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800885417.00020

Edited book

• The Property-Contract Interface: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
  
  Penner, J. E., Sakharova, I., Smith, H. E., & Tan, Z. X. (Eds.). (n.d.). The Property-Contract Interface: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives [Contracted by publisher]. Oxford University Press.

Journal Article

• (Mis)Understanding Correlativity in Contractual Relations
  
  Sakharova, I. (2024). (Mis)Understanding Correlativity in Contractual Relations. Ratio Juris: An International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, 37(1), 48-66. https://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12396
• The Power to Contract and the Offer-and-Acceptance Analysis of Contract Formation
  
  Sakharova, I. (2024). The Power to Contract and the Offer-and-Acceptance Analysis of Contract Formation. Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 37(1), 261-285. https://doi.org/10.1017/cjlj.2023.19