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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Inner Morality Of Private Law, Benjamin C. Zipursky
The Inner Morality Of Private Law, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Faculty Scholarship
Lon Fuller's classic The Morality of Law is an exploration of the basic principles of a legal system: the law should be publicly promulgated, prospective, clear, and general. So deep are these principles, he argued, that too great a deviation from them would not simply create a bad legal system and bad law, but would render the products of such a system undeserving of the name "law" at all. In this essay, I argue that Fuller's basic principles are not in fact desiderata for all of law, observing that much of private law plainly flouts them; it is unwritten, retroactive, …
Using Comparative Fault To Replace The All-Or-Nothing Lottery Imposed In Intentional Torts Suits In Which Both Plaintiff And Defendant Are At Fault , Gail D. Hollister
Using Comparative Fault To Replace The All-Or-Nothing Lottery Imposed In Intentional Torts Suits In Which Both Plaintiff And Defendant Are At Fault , Gail D. Hollister
Faculty Scholarship
All or nothing. For years this idea of absolutes has been a hallmark of tort law despite the inequities it has caused. Plaintiffs must either win a total victory or suffer total defeat. In recent years courts and legislatures have begun to recognize the injustice of the all-or-nothing approach and to replace it with rules that permit partial recoveries that are more equitably tailored to the particular facts of each case. The most dramatic example of this more equitable approach is the nearly universal rejection of contributory negligence in favor of comparative fault in negligence cases. Almost all jurisdictions, however, …
Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski
Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski
Faculty Scholarship
A century ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., examined the history of negligence in search of a general theory of tort. He concluded that from the earliest times in England, the basis of tort liability was fault, or the failure to exercise due care. Liability for an injury to another arose whenever the defendant failed "to use such care as a prudent man would use under the circumstances.” A decade ago Morton J. Horwitz reexamined the history of negligence for the same purpose and concluded that negligence was not originally understood as carelessness or fault. Rather, negligence meant "neglect or failure …