Whereas the Restatement of Torts and leading economic and justice-based approaches to explaining the standard of reasonable care advocate symmetric measurement of reasonable care across the defendant/plaintiff distinction, this article demonstrates that, in fact, the law applies this standard asymmetrically. Defendants are expected to discharge an objectively fixed amount of care, whereas plaintiffs are generally assessed using a subjective measurement of reasonable care. Normatively, I argue that an asymmetric assessment of care, because it combines an unfavorable assessment of defendant's negligence with a favorable assessment of plaintiff's negligence, means that the victim gets to fix the terms of the interaction. This argument resonates with the powerful egalitarian idea of accommodating, rather than overlooking, relevant differences; different treatment is necessary for the duty of reasonable care to give effect to the qualitative difference between the plaintiff's life and limb and the defendant's autonomy. Asymmetric assessment of due care, I argue, is the doctrinal metric by which the law determines what it is for the plaintiff and the defendant to relate as equals given that difference, or to relate as substantive equals.

What is at the heart of conflict over abortion? In his celebrated contribution to the topic, Ronald Dworkin argues that disputants in the abortion debate are in fact deeply mistaken about the true terms of their disagreement. Rather than turning on the perennial question of whether or not the fetus is a person, Dworkin claims that abortion argument is, at bottom, an argument about the intrinsic value of all human life and how it is best respected. More than twenty years after Dworkin put forward his novel thesis, this article reassesses his key claims about the crux of abortion argument, partly in light of subsequent developments in the public abortion conflict. Against Dworkin's revisionist account of the abortion problem, I set out to show that his arguments do not successfully displace the primacy of the personhood question in moral and legal constitutional reasoning about abortion. Nor do they convincingly establish that prenatal personhood is not what contestants in the abortion debate are really arguing about.

The disadvantaged have incentives to commit crime, and to develop criminogenic dispositions, that limit the extent to which their co-citizens can blame them for breaking the law. This is true regardless of whether the causes of criminality are mainly “structural” or “cultural.” We need not assume that society as a whole is unjust in order to accept this conclusion. And doing so would neither stigmatize nor otherwise disrespect the disadvantaged.