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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Foreword: Law, Psychology, And The Emotions, Heidi Li Feldman
Foreword: Law, Psychology, And The Emotions, Heidi Li Feldman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Given that law is made by and for people, the relatively little attention lawyers, judges, and legal scholars have paid to human psychology is surprising. Too often, legal writers have either presupposed or borrowed impoverished conceptions of human nature, erecting legal theories for people presumptively possessed of the requisite nature, regardless of the psychology of the actual persons who make and live under the law. Even when they do attend to human nature, legal scholars tend to ignore the centrality of emotions, dispositions, fantasies, and wishes to human psychology. The articles in this Symposium are united by their authors' resistance …
Prudence, Benevolence, And Negligence: Virtue Ethics And Tort Law, Heidi Li Feldman
Prudence, Benevolence, And Negligence: Virtue Ethics And Tort Law, Heidi Li Feldman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Tort law assesses negligence according to the conduct of a reasonable person of ordinary prudence who acts with due care for the safety of others. This standard assigns three traits to the person whose conduct sets the bar for measuring negligence: reasonableness, ordinary prudence, and due care for the safety of others. Yet contemporary tort scholars have almost exclusively examined only one of these attributes, reasonableness, and have wholly neglected to carefully examine the other elements key to the negligence standard: prudence and due care for the safety of others. It is mistaken to reduce negligence to reasonableness or to …