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’s research focuses on private law and comparative law, with a particular emphasis on tort 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.

Marco’s monograph Justifying Strict Liability: A Comparative Analysis in Legal Reasoning (OUP 2022), explores the main justifications for strict liability across 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.

Marco 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.

Marco completed a D.Phil. in Law and obtained an M.Jur. from the University of Oxford. He also holds an LL.M. 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, Italy. 

Publications

F. Bettini and M. Cappelletti, ‘Tackling Building Safety through Private Law: A Comparative Analysis’ in Matthew Bell, Susan Bright, Ben McFarlane, and Andrew Robertson (eds), Private Law and Building Safety (Hart Publishing 2025)

M. Cappelletti, ‘Justifying Harm-Based Strict Liability: Reflections on Keating’s Reasonableness and Risk’ (forthcoming in Law and Philosophy) 

M. Cappelletti, ‘A Pluralist View of Vicarious Liability in Tort’ (2024) 140 Law Quarterly Review 61

M. Cappelletti, Justifying Strict Liability: A Comparative Analysis in Legal Reasoning (OUP 2022) (awarded the Grand Prize of the International Academy of Comparative Law)

M. Cappelletti, ‘Compensatio lucri cum damno e Torts: prospettive inglesi alla luce delle quattro sentenze gemelle della Corte di Cassazione’ in Angelo Venchiarutti (ed), La compensatio lucri cum damno. Orientamenti italiani e europei a confronto (Pacini Giuridica 2020) 69

M. Cappelletti, ‘Compensatio Lucri cum Damno in Tort Law: An English Perspective on the Italian Four Judgments’ (2020) 28 European Review of Private Law 701

M. Cappelletti, ‘Réflexions comparatives sur le rôle de la punition en droit de la responsabilité délictuelle’ (2019) 116 Revue des contrats 293

M. Cappelletti, ‘Comparative Reflections on Punishment in Tort Law’ in J-S Borghetti and S Whittaker (eds), French Civil Liability in Comparative Perspective (Hart Publishing 2019) 329 (awarded the Ius Commune Prize for outstanding legal research)

M. Cappelletti, ‘Sui limiti alla risarcibilità iure hereditatis del danno biologico e morale in caso di morte del prossimo congiunto’ (2016) 2 Danno e Responsabilità 194

M. Cappelletti, ‘Punitive Damages and the Public/Private Distinction: A Comparison between the United States and Italy’ (2015) 32 Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law 799

M. Cappelletti, ‘Rapporto tra Sentenze Penali e Giudizio Civile Risarcitorio’ (2015) 6 Danno e Responsabilità 587

M. Cappelletti, ‘La tutela dell’affidamento e il dovere di coerenza nel diritto comparato’ (2011) 2 Rivista Critica del Diritto Privato 313