Description

This paper examines the relationship between rights to impose harm against a threat in self-defence and rights to impose harm upon an injurer for a compensatory purpose. It suggests that both have the same or a highly similar grounding. The paper examines the significance of this similarity for both sets of rights, and the justification of tort law.

About The Speaker

Sandy Steel is Lee Shau Kee’s Sir Man Kam Lo Fellow in Law at Wadham College and Associate Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law at Oxford. He is interested in philosophical and doctrinal questions about private law, particularly torts. He 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’ and his book Proof of Causation in Tort Law (CUP, 2015, 2017) was joint runner-up for the SLS Peter Birks Prize. His work has been cited by the UK Supreme Court and the High Court of Australia. He is currently working on a book about positive duties in tort law.