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PARTIAL LIABILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2017

Alex Kaiserman
Alex Kaiserman*
Affiliation:
Balliol College, University of Oxford, alexander.kaiserman@balliol.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing—a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant's loss. By contrast, this paper defends a causal theory of partial liability. I argue that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant's loss only to the degree to which the defendant's wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss. I ground this principle in a conception of tort law as a system of corrective justice and use it to critically evaluate different mechanisms for “limiting” liability for consequences of wrongdoing and for “apportioning” liability between multiple wrongdoers.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Theory , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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A correction has been issued for this article:

PARTIAL LIABILITY—CORRIGENDUM

Alex Kaiserman