Philosophical Foundations of Tort Law

About the Author

David Owen is Byrnes Scholar and Professor of Tort Law at the University of South Carolina. He is best known for his co-authorship of Prosser and Keeton on Torts and Products Liability and Safety, and he is currently working on additional books concerning the law of torts and products liability.

One group of essays examines how intent and blameworthiness bear on responsibility for harm, while another explores how causation interconnects responsibility and harm. Some essays probe philosophically into the great divides separating the law of torts from the law of contracts and the law of crimes, a number inquire into the types of harm properly redressable in tort, and one examines the role of a victims fault in responsibility theory. This is truly an Anglo-American production, with contributions from several distinguished Oxford scholars and over a dozen prominent experts in the field from the United States and Canada, as well as one from Israels leading tort theorist. Most of the authors are legal scholars interested in philosophy, and the collection offers a tantalizing invitation to philosophers to join the exploration of this intriguing interdisciplinary borderland between the all-too-separate fields of law and philosophy. This collection will be of great interest to lawyers everywhere, particularly those interested in the philosophical groundwork of tort law. A provocative closing essay by one of the worlds leading moral philosophers illuminates how tort law enables philosophers to observe the abstract theories of their discipline put to the concrete test in the legal resolution of real-world controversies based on principles of right and wrong.