LAUSR

Why do we impose tort liability when we do? I try this question on my students’ uncorrupted minds in the first class of my tort law course by posing several simple hypotheticals. Their answers often have to do with responsibility, often along the lines of ‘you have to pay, because you are responsible for another’s harm’. This intuitive idea has also attracted many tort theorists. Emmanuel Voyiakis’s answer is ostensibly also grounded in responsibility, but it is very different, and in the current state of the academic debates over the justification of tort liability, rather unfamiliar. To get a sense of just how much, it is hard to beat the summary of the view that appears in the very last sentence of his book: