Justifying Strict Liability

Holding someone liable for harm they did not directly cause is one of the most disputed questions in tort law, and scholars still disagree about what should ground it. An employer may be answerable for what its staff do, and a person may be answerable for injuries caused by a child, an animal, an activity, or an object in their charge. Judges, legislators, and other legal actors reach for a broad range of reasons when they impose liability in these situations.

This study looks at those reasons in England and the United States, two common law systems, and in France and Italy, two civil law systems. It examines a set of arguments that recur in all four: risk, accident avoidance, the deep pockets rationale, loss-spreading, victim protection, savings in administrative costs, and individual responsibility. Rather than treating each jurisdiction in isolation, it compares how these arguments are deployed and identifies recurring patterns in the way strict liability is reasoned about.

The author also weighs how much each argument counts for in each system. The arguments do not carry equal force everywhere, and the differences track disagreements about the purposes that strict liability and tort law as a whole are meant to serve.

The book aims to deepen understanding of strict liability, of the justifications offered for imposing it, and of the contrasting approaches to tort law found in these four legal systems.