ABSTRACT
When torts scholars write about autonomous vehicles (AVs), they take it as axiomatic that self-driving cars are a revolutionary technology of transportation, and they require a revolutionary change of automobile liability regime. Ken Abraham and Rober Rabin, for example, argued that the rise of AVs requires that we replace our existing, human-driver and product-centric liability regimes with an administrative scheme of strict manufacturer liability. Even scholars who propose reforms less radical agree that AVs present a radical challenge to our existing, human-driver centric, automobile liability regime. Mark Geistfeld, for instance, asserts that ‘[a]utonomous vehicles raise questions of legal responsibility fundamentally different from those involving conventional vehicles’ because the vehicle ‘cannot be legally responsible for its performance (it is, after all, not truly autonomous)’. This seems indisputably correct: AVs have neither the moral status nor the moral powers of human persons.
Yet, as is normally the case, the law is already setting about slotting autonomous vehicles into our existing automobile liability regime. It has been almost ten years since federal regulators determined that the operating systems of AVs can be considered drivers. This paper considers how this radically new technology might be shoehorned into old legal categories. It suggests that – precisely because AVs lack basic powers of moral agency – the law of torts might do best to hold them strictly liable for their accidents in a manner reminiscent of strict liability for animal trespass. Responsibility can only run through them; it cannot end with them – either by refusing to attribute responsibility to them for the accidents that they cause or by allowing liability to come to an end with them. If this is correct, the fundamental question that we face is to whom their strict liability should then be imputed.
Keating, Gregory C, Pouring New Wine into Old Skins: The Case of Self-Driving Cars (October 8, 2024), USC Law Legal Studies Paper No 24-33.
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