ABSTRACT
The ongoing fact of pluralist tort adjudication calls into serious question whether tort law plausibly coheres into a single integrated moral justification such as welfarism or Kantian right. A healthy political society values diverse viewpoints and their associated moral theories. Recognizing as much, Jane Stapleton and numerous other tort scholars have concluded that tort law is committed to pluralism as a substantive matter. Their reasoning seems incontrovertible: tort adjudication has always been conducted in terms of incompletely theorized mid-level principles such as reasonableness or fairness that can be justified by a plurality of values. Attempts to interpret tort law in terms of a single integrated justification miss the mark on this view, turning them into ‘grand theories’ that are practically useless for the bench and bar …
Geistfeld, Mark, Unifying Principles Within Pluralist Tort Adjudication (August 10, 2023) in Torts on Three Continents: Essays in Honor of Jane Stapleton, Kylie Burns, Jodi Gardner, Jonathan Morgan and Sandy Steel eds (Oxford University Press 2024).
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