Law Commons^™

Principled Adjudication: Tort Law And Beyond, Richard W. Wright

Richard W. Wright

The article briefly discusses the impossibility of a strict formalist or positivist approach to legal adjudication and the necessity and plausibility of a principled approach, according to which it is necessary to resort, explicitly or implicitly, to the principles underlying the positive expressions or sources of law to identify, interpret and apply the law, in easy as well as hard cases. The legitimacy of the principled approach crucially depends on resort to the community's moral principles as embedded in the existing law -- those moral principles which best explain as much as possible of the existing law -- rather than …

Judges As Tort Law Un-Makers: Recent California Experience With "New" Torts, Stephen D. Sugarman

Stephen D Sugarman

Part of the DePaul Law School's 1999 Clifford Symposium, this article explores the role of "judges as lawmakers" by examining the tort law decisions of the California Supreme Court for the past 15 years -- the final three years that Chief Justice Rose Bird sat on the court and the twelve years after she was removed from office. The article presents the sea change in tort law thinking, doctrine and results that have taken place over this period of time -- essentially through the abandonment of notions of enterprise liability (Calabresi thinking about cheaper cost avoiders and cheaper loss spreaders). …

The Role Of Compensation In Personal Injury Tort Law: A Response To The Opposite Concerns Of Gary Schwartz And Patrick Atiyah, Christopher J. Robinette

Christopher J Robinette