CPLC Work in Progress Seminar: 'Against Gut Feelings as Tort Theory'

Speaker: Craig Purshouse (Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Liverpool)

Advocates of ‘grand’ or ‘universal’ tort theories utilise a number of methods to justify their accounts. Among them are ‘interpretivism’, ‘reflective equilibrium’ and what I shall call ‘explaining important cases’. Interpretivism attempts to present the ‘best picture of the law’ by assessing a theory among four axes: fit, transparency, coherence and morality; reflective equilibrium aims to arrive at a correct theory by adjusting the theory to take account of one’s ‘considered judgements’ (or the case law); and ‘explaining important cases’ assesses the success of a theory by how well it, as the name suggests, explains a small selection of important cases. In this paper, I will use Allan Beever’s corrective justice account of negligence as a case study to expose how all of these methods ultimately boil down to gut feelings or intuitions. I will then argue that we have no reason, using these methods, to prefer corrective justice intuitions over utilitarian/consequentialist ones when explaining tort law.

Open to Faculty members, visitors, invitees and LLM/MCL/PhD students only

All Events will be held in the Law Faculty, Room B16