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PARTIAL LIABILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2017

Alex Kaiserman
Alex Kaiserman*
Affiliation:
Balliol College, University of Oxford, [email protected]
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Abstract

In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing—a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant's loss. By contrast, this paper defends a causal theory of partial liability. I argue that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant's loss only to the degree to which the defendant's wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss. I ground this principle in a conception of tort law as a system of corrective justice and use it to critically evaluate different mechanisms for “limiting” liability for consequences of wrongdoing and for “apportioning” liability between multiple wrongdoers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Theory , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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A correction has been issued for this article:

PARTIAL LIABILITY—CORRIGENDUM

Alex Kaiserman