Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco, Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective, and Civic Maturity (2025). To truly understand all the nuances and textures in Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco’s rich argument in her recent book, Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective, and Civic Maturity, a reader would likely need full fluency with the methodology and language of moral and ethical philosophy: terms like akrasia, proleptic, and phenomenology dance with Hume, Aristotle, and Kant throughout the chapters. Yet the book has much to offer even the non-philosopher kings and queens of tort law. It takes on the perpetually vexing question of whether there is an actual moral justification (as opposed to a mere policy one) for negligence liability, and, through nine chapters of careful argumentation, offers its own distinct answer. Eschewing previous theories, Rodríguez-Blanco argues that negligence liability is justifiably grounded in a defendant’s failure to adopt a deliberative-aspirational perspective, when that failure has caused injury to another … (more)
[Sarah Swan, JOTWELL, 11 May 2026]
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