Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Pricelessness And Life: An Essay For Guido Calabresi, Gregory C. Keating
Pricelessness And Life: An Essay For Guido Calabresi, Gregory C. Keating
Gregory C. Keating
This paper - written for a conference celebrating "The Costs of Accidents," three and half decades after its publication - pays tribute to Calabresi's remarkable exploration of the deepest, most disturbing and most difficult problem in the law of accidents. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Guido Calabresi has insisted that a tragic conflict of irreconcilable values lies at the heart of our law of accidents. We are profoundly committed both to "the ideal that life is a pearl beyond price" and to the practice of valuing people's lives in market terms - to the practice of pricing life. We …
Is Tort A Remedial Institution?, Gregory C. Keating
Is Tort A Remedial Institution?, Gregory C. Keating
Gregory C. Keating
In the past 30 years, philosophers of tort have performed invaluable work in restoring the concept of a “wrong” to prominence in tort scholarship, and in building a persuasive case that no adequate account of tort can replace the idea of a “wrong” with the idea of a “cost”. The structure of tort adjudication, which pits an injured victim against the party allegedly responsible for injuring her, is powerfully explained and justified by the thesis that the plaintiff has a claim for redress against the defendant when and because the defendant has wronged the plaintiff. The competing claim that tort …
Strict Liability And The Mitigation Of Moral Luck, Gregory C. Keating
Strict Liability And The Mitigation Of Moral Luck, Gregory C. Keating
Gregory C. Keating
The general problem of moral luck—that responsibility is profoundly affected by factors beyond the control of the person held responsible—has two distinct dimensions in the case of accidental injury (and no doubt in many other cases). One dimension is concerned with attribution of moral blame. Thomas Nagel explains: “If one negligently leaves the bath running with the baby in it, one will realize, as one bounds up the stairs towards the bathroom, that if the baby has drowned one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless.” How badly one has behaved and hence …