Gregory Keating, ‘Irreparable Injury and the Limits of the Law of Torts’ in 2 Oxford Studies in Private Legal Theory 185 (Paul B Miller and John Oberdiek eds 2023), available at SSRN (8 December 2022). Gregory Keating’s absorbing and insightful new article, ‘Irreparable Injury and the Limits of the Law of Torts’, surveys familiar territory from a distinctive vantage. As he does in his recent book, Reasonableness and Risk, Keating invites us to reconsider the fundamentals of what tort law is for and what reasonable care looks like. In this paper, he presents these questions through a central motivating problem: reparation is one of the central goals of tort (some would say its only goal), but in many cases, ‘tort reparation is not fully up to its assigned task’ (p 1). In particular, serious physical injury and death are two harms that tortious wrongdoing may inflict but the tort system cannot repair. Keating argues that this problem finds its clearest expression in cases of premature death (p 3) … (more)
[Leslie Kendrick, JOTWELL, 1 September 2023]
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