Philosophy And The Law Of Torts

When accidents occur and people suffer injuries, who ought to bear the loss? Tort law offers a complex set of rules to answer this question, but up to now philosophers have offered little by way of analysis of these rules. In eight essays commissioned for this volume, leading legal theorists examine the philosophical foundations of tort law. Amongst the questions they address are the following: how are the notions at the core of tort practice (such as responsibility, fault, negligence, due care, and duty to repair) to be understood? Is an explanation based on a conception of justice feasible? How are concerns of distributive and corrective justice related? What amounts to an adequate explanation of tort law? This collection will be of interest to professionals and advanced students working in philosophy of law, social theory, political theory, and law, as well as anyone seeking a better understanding of tort law.

This book offers a rich insight into the law of torts and cognate fileds, and will be of broad interest to those working in legal and moral philosophy. It has contributions from all over the world and represents the state-of-the art in tort theory.

There are three pairs of concepts which dominate the contemporary discussion concerning tort law: moral responsibility and social utility; corrective and distributive justice; and strict liability and fault. This text analyzes these concepts and examines their use in the liability context.

This exceptional collection of twenty-two essays on the philosophical fundamentals of tort law assembles many of the world's leading commentators on this particularly fascinating conjunction of law and philosophy. The contributions range broadly, from inquiries into how tort law derives fromAristotle, Aquinas, and Kant to the latest economic and rights-based theories of legal reponsibility. This is truly a multi-national production, with contributions from several distinguished Oxford scholars of law and philosophy and many prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, and Israel.A provocative closing essay by one of the world's leading moral philosophers illuminates how tort law enables philosophers to observe the abstract theories of their discipline put to the concrete test in the legal resolution of real-world controversies based on principles of right and wrong.

The essays in this volume are the result of a project on Values in Tort Law directed by the Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values. We are indebted to the Board of Westminster Col lege for its financial support. The project involved two meetings of a mixed group of lawyers and philosophers to discuss drafts of papers and general issues in tort law. Beyond the principal researchers, whose papers appear here, we are grateful to John Bargo, Dick Bronaugh, Craig Brown, Earl Cherniak, Bruce Feldthusen, Barry Hoffmaster and Steve Sharzer for their helpful discussion, and to Nancy Margolis for copy editing. All of these papers except one have appeared before in the journal Law and Philosophy (Vol. 1 No.3, December 1982 and Vol. 2 No.1, Apri11983). Chapman's paper which was previously published in The University of Western Ontario Law Review (Vol. 20 No.1, 1982) appears here with permission. Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values, M.D.B. Westminster College, London, Canada B.C. vii INTRODUCTION The law of torts is society's primary mechanism for resolving disputes arising from personal injury and property damage.

Tort law recognizes the many ways one person wrongs another. Arthur Ripstein brings coherence to torts’ diversity in a philosophically grounded, analytically powerful theory. He shows that all torts violate the basic moral idea that each person is in charge of his or her own person and property, and never in charge of another’s person or property.

"Recognizing Wrongs is about tort law, also commonly known as "personal injury law." The book's central thesis is that tort law fulfills a basic obligation that government owes to each of us: to provide law that defines and proscribes a special class of wrongs - wrongs that involve one person mistreating another - and to provide a means for victims of such wrongs to obtain redress from those who have wronged them. This book aims to recover the traditional understanding of tort law by helping readers to recognize what it is all about. It does so by offering a systematic statement of a theory now known in academic circles as "civil recourse theory." In providing a comprehensive statement of that theory, the book aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law - corrective justice theory, as put forward by Jules Coleman, John Gardner, Arthur Ripstein, Ernest Weinrib, and others - as well as the economic approach favored by scholars such as Guido Calabresi and Richard Posner"--

This book modernizes the traditional tort law textbook by combining in-depth analysis of policy with detailed discussion of legal doctrine.