ABSTRACT
In American tort law ‘enterprise liability’ is a response to the profound transformation of the social world brought about by modern industrial, technological society. In this world, most accidental harm is not the random byproduct of isolated individuals going about their idiosyncratic existences in civil society. Instead, the harms and wrongs characteristic of modern social life are the inevitable, and predictable, byproduct of the basic productive activities of modern life. Enterprise liability expresses the idea that responsibility for these harms and wrongs should be absorbed by the activities that engender them, and then be distributed across all those who benefit from those activities – not left on the individuals who happen either to inflict or to suffer them. This chapters seeks to explains the institutional logic of, and normative justification for, enterprise liability, and to show how and why it constitutes a distinctive regime of responsibility.
Keating, Gregory C, Enterprise Liability (August 18, 2022). Forthcoming in Handbook on Corporate Liability, Martin Petrin and Christian Witting, eds (Edward Elgar, 2023); USC CLASS Research Paper No CLASS22-25; USC Law Legal Studies Paper No 22-25.
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