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. 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.

Chapter 8. Remedies, Part 1: As If It Had Never Happened -- Chapter 9. Remedies, Part 2: Before a Court -- Chapter 10. Conclusion: Horizontal and Vertical -- Index

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.

Two preeminent legal scholars explain what tort law is all about and why it matters, and describe their own view of tort’s philosophical basis: civil recourse theory. Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly. Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.

Tort Law: A Modern Perspective is an advanced yet accessible introduction to tort law for lawyers, law students, and others. Reflecting the way tort law is taught today, it explains the cases and legal doctrines commonly found in casebooks using modern ideas about public policy, economics, and philosophy. With an emphasis on policy rationales, Tort Law encourages readers to think critically about the justifications for legal doctrines. Although the topic of torts is specific, the conceptual approach should pay dividends to those who are interested broadly in regulatory policy and the role of law. Incorporating three decades of advancements in tort scholarship, Tort Law is the textbook for modern torts classrooms.

Duty and Integrity in Tort Law is a comprehensive, versatile and revolutionary examination of the tort concept of duty. After tracing the historical evolution of tort law, Duty and Integrity analyzes the current approaches to tort duties, including the new approach offered by the authoritive Restatement (Third) of Torts. Unlike these approaches, which tend to focus exclusively on negligence duties, Duty and Integrity examines the role of duty in all three of tort law's theories of liability--intentional torts, strict liability and negligence--exposing the similarities and differences of these duties and suggesting grounds for their integration. Aside from its critical commentary, Duty and Integrity contains many important philosophical and pragmatic insights. It reveals the moral and political foundations of tort law and duty by offering accessible explorations of corrective justice, distributive justice, and liberalism. Because liberal justice requires coherence in law, Ronald Dworkin's acclaimed theory of "law as integrity" both frames and instructs the discussion. After explaining, critiquing, and endorsing a modified version of Dworkin's approach, the book presents a groundbreaking methodology called "duty as integrity" for resolving any tort duty question. To demonstrate the practicality of this approach, Duty and Integrity concludes by thoroughly applying the proposed methodology to a recent and controversial decision of an influential state supreme court. Given its broad intellectual scope, Duty and Integrity in Tort Law should appeal to legal and nonlegal academics and their students, as well as members of the legal community at large. Its transparent style makes it suitable both for advanced undergraduate or graduate classes on law, philosophy or polilitical science and for law school courses on torts, advanced torts, tort theory, jurisprudence, law and politics, law and policy, legal history, and many more.