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.

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.

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 collection brings together the best contemporary philosophical work in the area of intersection between philosophy of language and the law. Some of the contributors are philosophers of language who are interested in applying advances in philosophy of language to legal issues, and some of the participants are philosophers of law who are interested in applying insights and theories from philosophy of language to their work on the nature of law and legal interpretation. By making this body of recent work available in a single volume, readers will gain both a general overview of the various interactions between language and law, and also detailed analyses of particular areas in which this interaction is manifest. The contributions to this volume are grouped under three main general areas: The first area concerns a critical assessment, in light of recent advances in philosophy of language, of the foundational role of language in understanding the nature of law itself. The second main area concerns a number of ways in which an understanding of language can resolve some of the issues prevalent in legal interpretation, such as the various ways in which semantic content can differ from law's assertive content; the contribution of presuppositions and pragmatic implicatures in understanding what the law conveys; the role of vagueness in legal language, for example. The third general topic concerns the role of language in the context of particular legal doctrines and legal solutions to practical problems, such as the legal definitions of inchoate crimes, the legal definition of torture, or the contractual doctrines concerning default rules. Together, these three key issues cover a wide range of philosophical interests in law that can be elucidated by a better understanding of language and linguistic communication.

Hate speech law can be found throughout the world. But it is also the subject of numerous principled arguments, both for and against. These principles invoke a host of morally relevant features (e.g., liberty, health, autonomy, security, non-subordination, the absence of oppression, human dignity, the discovery of truth, the acquisition of knowledge, self-realization, human excellence, civic dignity, cultural diversity and choice, recognition of cultural identity, intercultural dialogue, participation in democratic self-government, being subject only to legitimate rule) and practical considerations (e.g., efficacy, the least restrictive alternative, chilling effects). The book develops and then critically examines these various principled arguments. It also attempts to de-homogenize hate speech law into different clusters of laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech, so as to facilitate a more nuanced examination of the principled arguments. Finally, it argues that it is morally fitting for judicial and legislative judgments about the overall warrant of hate speech law to reflect principled compromise. Principled compromise is characterized not merely by compromise over matters of principled concern but also by compromise which is itself governed by ideals of moral duty or civic virtue (e.g., reciprocity, equality, and mutual respect). The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315714899, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Providing a comprehensive and principled account of the uncertainty problem that arises in tort litigation, this text critically examines the existing doctrinal solutions of the problem, as evolved in England, United States, Canada & Israel.

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.