CPLC Seminar: 'Tort as a Redundant System - Beyond Pluralism'

Speaker: Professor David Howarth, University of Cambridge

Is the tort system worthwhile? A common answer to that question is that it is not worthwhile because for every goal one might assert for tort law some other set of legal rules or institutions is better at achieving it. But what if we were to see tort law not as competing with other rules or institutions but as complementing them, as, in engineering terms, providing 'redundancy' to systems designed to achieve the various goals? If one adds together the benefits tort law provides across all the different goals to whose achievement it contributes as 'redundancy' and compares that to the cost of running the system, would we still say that the tort system is not worthwhile? This paper attempts a very preliminary answer to that question, identifying in the process gaps in the data and in our understanding of the goals themselves.

This seminar is open to all LLM, MCL and PhD students, Faculty members and Faculty visitors.