Justice Dickson's Civil Tort Law Jurisprudence

Wrongful life, wrongful birth, and justice in tort law.

Distributive and Corrective Justice in the Tort Law of Accidents

Tort scholarship on the law of negligence has long been torn between two competing conceptions. One of these conceptions—the justice conception—holds that negligence law is (and should be) an articulation of our ordinary moral conceptions of agency and responsibility, carelessness and wrongdoing, harm and reparation. The other conception—the economic conception—holds that the law of negligence ...

Tort Law from the Perspective of Corrective and Distributive Justice

In the following paper we will be mapping tort law in the common law, reflecting on the divergence between corrective and distributive justice and their main theoretical defenses deployed by Anglo-American scholars. The concepts are in turn portrayed in their proper context: a legal culture shaped historically different from the continental legal culture. However, at a deeper level, both tradit...

Empathy, Justice, and Jurisprudence

This paper uses a study of the opinions in a case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., to explain the role of empathy in legal interpretation. I argue for two theses: (1) that empathy is essential to an interpretation of law if that interpretation is to serve the interests of justice and (2) that no interpretation of a law is sound if it ignores w...

‘privatizing’ Civil Justice through Procedural Agreements: a Comparative Law Analysis*

This study aims at examining, in a systemic and, to the extent possible, comprehensive manner, the topic of procedural agreements in United States civil procedure law and afterwards to compare the relevant experience with the results of analogous researches conducted in respect with single national procedural systems in Europe. It is widely recognized that party autonomy is paramount in arbitra...