Private law governs our most pervasive relationships: the wrongs we do one another, the contracts we make and break, and the property we own. This book analyses the deepest questions about the law's foundations, showing how a distinctive notion of justice, 'corrective justice', describes the special morality intrinsic to private law.

Lawyers who write about responsibility tend to focus on criminal law at the expense of civil and public law; while philosophers tend to treat responsibility as a moral concept,and either ignore the law or consider legal responsibility to be a more or less distorted reflection of its moral counterpart. This book aims to counteract both of these biases. By adopting a comparative institutional approach to the relationship between law and morality, it challenges the common view that morality stands to law as critical standard to conventional practice. It shows how law and morality interact symbiotically, and how careful study of legal concepts of responsibility can add significantly to our understanding of responsibility more generally. Central to this project is a distinction between two paradigms of responsibility -- the criminal law paradigm and the civil law paradigm. Whereas theoretical discussions of responsibility tend focus on conduct and agency, taking account of civil law reveals the importance of outcomes and the interests of victims and society to ideas of responsibility. The book examines from a distinctively legal point of view central philosophical questions about responsibility such as its relationship with culpability (challenging the common view that moral responsibility requires fault), causation and personality. It explores the relevance of sanctions and problems of proof and enforcement to ideas of responsibility, as well as the relationship between responsibility and distributive justice, and the role of concepts of responsibility in public law. At the heart of this book lie two questions: what does it mean to say we are responsible? and, what are our responsibilities? Its aim is not to answer these questions but to challenge some traditional approaches to answering them and more importantly, to suggest fruitful alternative approaches that take law seriously.

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.

Corrective and Distributive Justice: From Aristotle to Modern Times retraces the intricate history of the distinction between corrective and distributive justice. This distinction is elaborated in the 5th book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which was rediscovered in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries by the Scholastics and turned into a central topic in legal and theological scholarship. After a decline of interest in the wake of the enlightenment and secularization, a surprising revival of these notions of justice occurred in U.S. legal and philosophical discourse during the last four decades that has made this distinction a central issue in tort law, restitution and other important fields of private and public law. In literally hundreds of articles and a considerable number of books, the Aristotelian distinction has been elaborated, discussed, and applied. Englard's unique contribution to this aspect of legal history grants the contemporary reader a historical perspective that is vital for a deepened understanding of the distinction and modern concerns. Organized chronologically, Englard's research covers: Aristotle, High Scholastics, Late Scholastics, Post-Scholastics, and Modernity. The relevant literature is notoriously difficult to access, not only because of its Latin language, but because of the physical rarity of the relevant books scattered throughout the world. This book offers the modern reader a touchstone synthesis of intellectual and legal history.

Jules Coleman discusses the conflict between the goals of justice and economic efficiency in the allocation of risk, especially risk pertaining to safety.

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.