Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
Scott Hershovitz, ‘The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Tort Law’
Private Wrongs by Arthur Ripstein, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 2016. Pp. ix, 313. $49.95. Theorists like to do a lot with a little. And not just because simple theories seem more elegant: we deepen our understanding when we learn that disparate phenomena are linked together. In physics, for example, the theory of thermodynamics showed […]
Qingxiu Bu, ‘The Good Samaritan in the Chinese Society: Morality vis-à-vis Law’
Abstract: Apathy has become a problem which endangers Chinese society, in part because those assisting the injured could be exposed to liability. With reference to both law and morality, the longstanding issue of ‘duty to rescue’ is explored in the Chinese socio-legal context. It remains highly controversial whether it is legitimate or justifiable to impose […]
Ariel Porat, ‘The Future of Law and Economics and the Calabresian External Moral Costs’
Abstract: This short essay is a contribution to a symposium held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Professor Calabresi’s The Future of Law and Economics. It focuses on Calabresi’s arguments that tort law facilitates a modified market for merit goods, and that external moral costs should be seriously taken into account by the state […]
Mayo Moran, ‘Reshaping Responsibility: The Emerging Private Law of Institutional Wrongs’
Abstract: Complex claims of institutional liability are in many ways the new normal for private law. Witness for example the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and claims of institutional complicity in widespread wrongdoing. This chapter examines how these cases came to be, with particular focus on the evolution of the duty of care and related […]
Andrew Cohen, ‘Vicarious Apologies as Moral Repair’
Abstract: Apologies are key components of moral repair. They can identify a wrong, express regret, and accept culpability for some transgression. Apologies can vindicate a victim’s value as someone who was due different treatment. This paper explores whether acts with vicarious elements may serve as apologies. I offer a functionalist account of apologies: acts are […]
Bailey Kuklin, ‘Private Requitals’
Abstract: Legal and moral norms have expanded their protections of individual autonomy over the centuries. The emphasis and impressions by most scholars regarding this progress, however, have been misleading, in my view. It is not that we have developed better standards by which to protect a pre-existing conception of autonomy. This puts the endeavor backwards. […]
Andrew Gold, ‘Private Rights and Private Wrongs’
Abstract: This essay reviews Arthur Ripstein’s new book, Private Wrongs (Harvard University Press, 2016). Private Wrongs will be a landmark in tort theory, as it brilliantly applies Ripstein’s Kantian account of tort law to legal doctrine. At the center of the book’s argument is the view that one person should not get to be in […]
Just published: Allan Beever, A Theory of Tort Liability
This book provides a comprehensive theory of the rights upon which tort law is based and the liability that flows from violating those rights. Inspired by the account of private law contained in Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, the book shows that Kant’s theory elucidates a conception of interpersonal wrongdoing that illuminates the operation of […]
Carmen Pavel, ‘A Legal Conventionalist Approach to Pollution’
Abstract: There are no moral entitlements with respect to pollution prior to legal conventions that establish them, or so I will argue. While some moral entitlements precede legal conventions, pollution is part of a category of harms against interests that stands apart in this regard. More specifically, pollution is a problematic type of harm that […]
Jani McCutcheon, ‘Dead Loss: Damages for Posthumous Breach of the Moral Right of Integrity’
Abstract: This article considers whether damages may be awarded for the posthumous breach of an author’s moral right of integrity, which endures for 70 years post-mortem and, in many common law countries, protects authors against certain conduct in respect of a work which is prejudicial to their honour or reputation. While remedies for infringement ostensibly […]