Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
What food best represents tort law? The question is not as bizarre as it first appears and the answer no longer appears to be escargot washed down with a ginger beer float. Indeed, food-based metaphors seem especially popular among tort theorists. For Robert Stevens, tort law is ‘not like minestrone soup’ insofar as one cannot ‘simply add together a number of disparate ingredients and hope to get a satisfactory result’. In her Clarendon Law Lectures, Jane Stapleton, no doubt in a nod to those remarks, was critical of theorists who ‘describe tort law as being fundamentally “all about one thing”, like carrot purée’. In the ‘carrot purée’ camp are those who have been referred to as ‘Grand Theorists’, ‘reductionists’, or ‘rights-fundamentalists’. This would encompass scholars in the corrective justice and rights-based traditions of tort theory …

€ (Westlaw)

Craig Purshouse, ‘Tort theory and the interpretive sleight of hand’ (2024) 140 (April) Law Quarterly Review 301.