Description

This paper argues (1) that there are instances of legal liability for harm that it was all-things-considered permissible to cause, (2) that the law’s approach to such cases is inconsistent, and (3) it identifies difficulties with existing justifications of liability in such cases, before offering its own. Overall it seeks to explain theoretically why duties to compensate come apart from moral permissibility.

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About The Speaker

Sandy Steel is Professor of Law and Philosophy of Law in the Faculty of Law at Oxford and Lee Shau Kee’s Sir Man Kam Lo Fellow in Law at Wadham College. He holds or held visiting appointments at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, the University of Münster, and New York University. He’s interested in philosophical and doctrinal questions about private law. He has written mainly about torts and private law theory, but also maintains an interest in general jurisprudence and has co-authored (with Nick McBride) a critical guide to the subject: Great Debates in Jurisprudence (Palgrave, 2014, 2nd edn 2018). In 2016, he was awarded the Modern Law Review’s Wedderburn Prize for his article ‘Justifying Exceptions to Proof of Causation in Tort Law’. His other book, Proof of Causation in Tort Law (CUP, 2015, paperback edn 2017) won the Society of Legal Scholars Birks Runner-up Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. His work has been cited by the UK Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the High Court of Australia. He is currently busy working on two monographs for OUP, one on omissions liability in tort, and one on the normative foundations of remedial law.