John Gardner's From Personal Life to Private Law is a striking marriage of cultivated sensibility and analytic prowess. Professor Gardner is both acutely sensitive to the lived experience of our moral relationships and highly skilled at disentangling the threads which those relationships weave...

This paper comments on Ronen Avraham & Kim Yuracko, Torts and Discrimination forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal. Professors Avraham and Yuracko's fine article, Torts and Discrimination, calls our attention to the fact that the entrenched fact of race and gender discrimination exerts a...

A prominent, important strand of contemporary thinking about tort law — represented most powerfully by the work of Arthur Ripstein and Ernest Weinrib — has coalesced around the thesis that the concept of “private law” is the key to the subject. In one familiar usage of the term, the...

This chapter sketches a general framework which explains why questions of fairness have a natural salience when the imposition of risks of harm by some on others is at issue, and it applies that conception to major aspects of negligence law. Fairness comes to the fore because risk impositions...

Instrumentalist ideas have long been prominent in torts scholarship. Since the rise of legal realism, discussions of deterrence, compensation, the minimization of accident costs, and the distribution of losses, have dominated scholarly discourse. In the past several decades, however, wholesale...

This chapter discusses the concept of corrective justice, which has been at the heart of much recent scholarship on the law of torts in particular, and private law more generally. Notwithstanding its familiarity, ancient origin, and apparent universal acceptance, the concept of corrective...

More than twenty years ago, George Fletcher showed that the competing ideals of fairness and utility battle over the interpretation and justification of tort doctrine. This article argues that the very concept of negligence (or reasonable care) is itself a front in that struggle. Law and...