Gary E Marchant, ‘Swords and Shields: Impact of Private Standards for Liability Determinations of Autonomous Vehicles’, 18 Journal of Tort Law 311 (2025). What happens when a self-driving car kills someone and there is no human driver to blame, no detailed public regulation to point to, and a jury that has never heard of ISO 26262 or UL 4600? Who decides what ‘reasonable care’ means when safety choices are embedded in code, sensors, and validation protocols rather than in a driver’s split-second decision? In his insightful paper ‘Swords and Shields’, Gary Marchant argues that in this world, private technical standards will quietly become the real baseline for tort law … (more)
[Ronen Avraham, JOTWELL, 10 February 2026]
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