Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts

John Oberdiek is Professor at the Rutgers University School of Law. His is also a Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, Associate Graduate Faculty in the Rutgers Department of Philosophy, Co-Editor of the journal Law and Philosophy, and has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.

Indeed, John Oberdiek has assembled nineteen thoughtful essays and provided an extremely helpful introduction, which together make an important contribution to the ongoing enterprise of understanding and evaluating tort law (and private law, more generally).

• INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE LAW OF TORTS ; PART I: FOUNDATIONS OF TORT LAW ; 1. Tort Law and Responsibility ; 2. Torts, Rights, and Risk ; 3. Compensation as a Tort Norm ; 4. Tort as a Substitute for Revenge ; 5. Structure and Justification in Contractualist Tort Theory ; 6. On the "Property" and the "Tort" in Trespass ; 7. Tort Law and Public Functions ; PART II: HARMS, WRONGS, RESPONSIBILITY, AND LIABILITY ; 8. What Might have Been ; 9. Why Reparations? ; 10. Repairing Harms and Answering for Wrongs ; 11. Tort Processes and Relational Repair ; 12. Tort Liability and Taking Responsibility ; 13. Exploring the Relationship Between Consent, Assumption of Risk, and Victim Negligence ; 14. Strict Liability Wrongs ; 15. Normative Theories of Punitive Damages: The Case of Deterrence ; PART III: DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE IN TORT LAW ; 16. What is Tort Law For? Part 2. The Place of Distributive Justice ; 17. Tort Law and Distributive Justice ; PART IV: SKEPTICAL PERSPECTIVES ; 18. Finding No Fault With Negligence ; 19. Confused Culpability, Contrived Causation, and the Collapse of Tort Theory ; BIBLIOGRAPHY