Dr Marco Cappelletti

Marco is a Tutorial Fellow in Law at Worcester College. Currently, he teaches Tort and Contract, and he has also taught Land Law and Roman law. Prior to his current position, Marco was College Lecturer in Law (2023-2024) and Junior Research Fellow (2019-2023) at St John’s College, Oxford.

Marco completed a DPhil in Oxford. He also holds an MJur from the University of Oxford, an LLM from Harvard Law School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and received the Dean’s Scholar Prize for academic excellence, and a five-year law degree from the University of Perugia.

Marco’s research interests lie in private law (especially Tort and Contract) and in comparative law:

• He is the author of an article offering a pluralist account of vicarious liability in tort law, recently published in the Law Quarterly Review: A Pluralist View of Vicarious Liability in Tort (2024) 140 LQR 61.
• He is the author of the monograph Justifying Strict Liability: A Comparative Analysis in Legal Reasoning (OUP 2022), which explores the most significant justifications that are put forward to justify strict liability in four legal systems, two common law, England and the United States, and two civil law, France and Italy. In 2022, this monograph was awarded the Grand Prize of the International Academy of Comparative Law.
• Marco’s work on the role of punishment in tort law, entitled ‘Comparative Reflections on Punishment in Tort Law’ and published in Jean-Sébastien Borghetti and Simon Whittaker (eds), French Civil Liability in Comparative Perspective (Hart Publishing 2019), has been awarded the Ius Commune Prize for outstanding legal research. This work was also translated into French and published as ‘Réflexions comparatives sur le rôle de la punition en droit de la responsabilité délictuelle’ in the French Revue des contrats, issue 4, in December 2019.
• He is the co-author of ‘Tackling Building Safety through Private Law: A Comparative Analysis’, forthcoming in a collection of essays edited by Matthew Bell, Susan Bright, Ben McFarlane, and Andrew Robertson (Hart Publishing 2025).
• He is currently working on the justifications for vicarious liability, on the concept of foreseeability in private law (both in English law and from a comparative perspective), and on the different standards of liability in the context of accidental harm.