Wrongs, Harms, and Compensation

In this work, Adam Slavny explores our moral duties to respond to wrongs and harms, and defends the significance of these duties for the normative foundations of tort law.

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Non-instrumentalist private law theory has been dominated by an interpretivist methodology that seeks to understand the concepts, doctrines, and structures of the law in principled terms. This has resulted in the neglect of purely normative analysis and a failure to engage systematically with the methodologies of moral and political philosophy.

Wrongs, Harms, and Compensation: Paying for our Mistakes departs from this approach, arguing instead that the justification of tort law is dependent on our underlying moral corrective duties. In this book, Adam Slavny develops a pluralistic account of these duties, which encompasses both wrongful and non-wrongful conduct, complicating the view that torts should be regarded as a coherent set of wrongs. He also places the practice of enforcing corrective duties in a broader context, arguing that it should not be isolated or immune to critiques based on distributive justice, and that our duties are in fact consistent with institutional arrangements other than tort law, including various types of compensation schemes.

What emerges is neither a wholesale defence of or attack on tort law, but an insistence that its normative foundations are much more complex, diverse, and malleable than a focus on current legal practices would suggest.