Private Law Theory

Abstract:
In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing – a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant’s loss. By contrast, this paper defends a causal theory of partial liability. I argue that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant’s loss only to the degree to which the defendant’s wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss. I ground this principle in a conception of tort law as a system of corrective justice and use it to critically evaluate different mechanisms for ‘limiting’ liability for consequences of wrongdoing and for ‘apportioning’ liability between multiple wrongdoers.

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Alex Kaiserman, Partial Liability, Legal Theory volume 23, issue 1, March 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352325217000040. Published online: 31 July 2017.

First posted 2017-08-04 05:56:35