Justice And Tort Law

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.

Inspired by the contemporary debate over tort reform, Justice and Tort Law examines the moral structure and content of tort law to determine whether this movement is good or bad, and to offer insights into the law's uncertain future. Calnan's book presents a liberal account of tort law that is both positive and normative and provides a comprehensive theory and analysis of the justice of tort law. This approach looks beyond the notion of corrective justice and examines concepts of distributive and retributive justice and reciprocity. In presenting his ideas, Calnan explains the distributive nature of all laws, and tort law in particular. This book will especially be of interest to scholars and attorneys interested in tort law reform, but also to professors and practitioners interested in liability law, corrective justice, criminal law, and torts.

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.

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.

Documenting a prominent jurist's efforts, a collection of case studies examines his successes with Vietnam veteran exposure to Agent Orange, asbestos, and DES and repetitive stress syndrome, describes current legal attitudes, and recommends compassionate alternatives.

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.

In this even-handed and fascinating book, two leading tort experts explain to lay readers the strengths and weaknesses of our tort law system. They discuss tort law's compensatory and deterrent functions; its delays, fortuity, and high transaction costs (mostly in lawyer's fees); and its role in discouraging harmful - as well as, on occasion, useful - activities. Bell and O'Connell conclude with an objective review of such current reform enactments and proposals as no-fault insurance, caps on damages, and contingency fee reform.

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.

Widely regarded as a standard in the field, G. Edward White's Tort Law in America is a concise and accessible history of the way legal scholars and judges have conceptualized the subject of torts, the reasons that changes in certain rules and doctrines have occurred, and the people who brought about these changes. Now in an expanded edition, Tort Law in America features a new preface that places the book within the current scholarship and two new chapters covering developments in American tort law over the past fifteen years. White approaches his subject from four perspectives: intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, the phenomenon of professionalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, and the recurrent concerns of tort law since its emergence as a discrete field. He puts the intellectual history of this unique branch of law into the general picture of philosophy, sociology, and literature in what is not only a major work of legal scholarship but also a tour de force for anyone interested in American intellectual history.

This book argues, from a normative perspective, for the incorporation of an egalitarian sensitivity into tort law, and more generally, into private law. It shows how an egalitarian sensitivity can reformulate tort doctrine, with an emphasis on the tort of negligence. Rather than a comprehensive descriptive account of existing tort law, this book pro-actively searches for new approaches and conceptual tools to meet the challenges faced by egalitarians. The understanding of tort law offered in this book will bring about better practical results in specific cases. It supports the progressive troops in the ongoing philosophical and social battles that take place in the field of tort law and also adds another voice - rich, nuanced and sensitive - to the chorus that is tort theory.