(Monsanto Lecture) What Does Tort Law Do? What Can it Do?

21 Pages Posted: 29 Jul 2013 Last revised: 11 Sep 2013

See all articles by Scott Hershovitz

Scott Hershovitz

University of Michigan Law School

Date Written: July 28, 2013

Abstract

It’s not hard to describe what tort law does. As a first approximation, we might say that tort empowers those who suffer certain sorts of injuries or invasions to seek remedies from those who brought about those injuries or invasions. The challenge is to explain why tort does that, or to explain what tort is trying to do when it does that. After all, it is not obvious that we should have an institution specially concerned with the injuries and invasions that count as torts.

In this essay (delivered as the 2012 Monsanto Lecture at Valparaiso University School of Law), I argue that tort is concerned with those injuries and invasions because it aims at corrective justice, not efficiency. But I contend that the corrective justice tort pursues is not best understood on an Aristotelian model, which requires that wrongful transactions be reversed. Rather, I argue, tort pursues corrective justice in much the same way that revenge does — by offering a performance aimed at persuading us that victim and wrongdoer are even in respect of the wrong.

Keywords: tort, corrective justice, efficiency, revenge, getting even, John Gardner, continuity thesis

JEL Classification: K13

Suggested Citation

Hershovitz, Scott, (Monsanto Lecture) What Does Tort Law Do? What Can it Do? (July 28, 2013). Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2012, U of Michigan Public Law Research Paper No. 345, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2302358

Scott Hershovitz (Contact Author)

University of Michigan Law School ( email )

625 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1215
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
304
Abstract Views
3,210
Rank
181,378
PlumX Metrics