Torts and other Wrongs is a collection of eleven of the author's essays on the theory of the law of torts and its place in the law more generally. Two new essays accompany nine previously published pieces, a number of which are already established classics of theoretical writing on private law. Together they range across the distinction between torts and other wrongs, the moral significance of outcomes, the nature and role of corrective and distributive justice, the justification
Chapter 8. Remedies, Part 1: As If It Had Never Happened -- Chapter 9. Remedies, Part 2: Before a Court -- Chapter 10. Conclusion: Horizontal and Vertical -- Index
Two preeminent legal scholars explain what tort law is all about and why it matters, and describe their own view of tort’s philosophical basis: civil recourse theory. Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly. Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.
Now in its third edition this popular text has been comprehensively rewritten to take account of all new developments in the law, as well as Law Commission reports and academic writings. The book has also been restructured and divided into parts which correspond to the primary functions of the remedies for torts and breach of contract, namely compensation, restitution and punishment, compelling performance or preventing (or compelling the undoing of) a wrong, and declaring rights. Reflecting their increased importance in practice, and the considerable recent academic attention devoted to them, there is also a new chapter on remedies for equitable wrongs such as breach of fiduciary duty and reach of confidence.
Tort law and criminal law are closely bound together but their relationship rarely receives sustained and rigorous scrutiny. This is the first significant project in England and Wales to address that shortcoming. Building on growing interest amongst both academics and practitioners in the relationship between tort and crime, it draws together leading experts to chart the field and explore key points of interest. It uses a range of perspectives from legal theory, doctrine, legal history and comparative law to address some of the most important and interesting links between tort and crime. Examples include how the illegality defence operates to avoid stultification of the law, the difference between criminal and civil causation, how the Motor Insurers' Bureau not only insures but acts to enforce laws and alter behaviour, and why civil law only very rarely restores specific property but the criminal law does it daily.
Civil wrongs occupy a significant place in private law. They are particularly prominent in tort law, but equally have a place in contract law, property and intellectual property law, unjust enrichment, fiduciary law, and in equity more broadly. Civil wrongs are also a preoccupation of leading general theories of private law, including corrective justice and civil recourse theories. According to these and other theories, the centrality of civil wrongs to civil liability shows that private law is fundamentally concerned with the expression and enforcement of norms of justice appropriate to interpersonal interaction and association. Others, sounding notes of caution or criticism, argue that a preoccupation with wrongs and remedies has meant neglect of other ways in which private law serves justice, and ways in which private law serves values other than justice. This volume comprises original papers written by a wide variety of legal theorists and philosophers exploring the nature of civil wrongs, their place in private law, and their relationship to other forms of wrongdoing.
'Coherently brings together many of the arguments that the left has pressed against tort law' Cambridge Law Journal'Its great strength lies in its uncompromising critique of the traditional textbook analyses of tort doctrine as a logical, neutral and inevitable development of peculiarly legal categories' Modern Law ReviewThis new edition of The Wrongs of Tort has been thoroughly updated to take account of the many new developments since its original publication in 1993 - without losing any of the spirit or vigour of the original text. It challenges the assumption in law education that tort is 'objective', 'neutral' and 'apolitical', and reveals how it is imbued with politics. The authors argue that the system of tort is usually hidden from students and lawyers, and that this is unacceptable because the system is arbitrary, and its underlying ideology callous. This controversial book challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, and continues to shed light on the dusty annals of traditional tort doctrine.
Private law governs our most pervasive relationships: the wrongs we do one another, the contracts we make and break, and the property we own. This book analyses the deepest questions about the law's foundations, showing how a distinctive notion of justice, 'corrective justice', describes the special morality intrinsic to private law.
