This book owes its origin to my dissatisfaction with the current state of tort doctrine and theory. When I began teaching tort law more than a decade ago, it became clear that the schisms in tort theory and the verbal patches holding tort doctrine together signaled the need for a deeper understanding of the normative theory that justifies tort law. Among the animating conundrums I faced were the deep, antagonistic, and seemingly unbridgeable divide between corrective justice and economic theory, the multiple goals that tort law is said to serve, and the inadequate justifications given for (among other things) duty and no-duty rules, proximate cause, and the injection of strict liability into the otherwise dominant negligence regime. Clearly, I thought, there must be a better way to understand tort law.

My search for a new way of looking at tort law led me to believe that the underlying problem was a failure of justification – that is, a failure to understand the reasons why tort law finds one person responsible for the well-being of others, and the limits of that responsibility. As I explored the justification for various decisions, I saw that too often our understanding of why the courts decide one way rather than another was not supported by sound analysis of the factors that would lead to a just outcome. The decisions were supported instead by bland appeal to generalized ideas that did not reveal the normative basis for the decision.