The Public Right and Wrongs: Tort Theory and the Problem of Public Nuisance

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Sebok

Abstract Tort theory over the past two decades has been characterized by a fruitful dialectic between two models. Instrumentalism, especially, in its deterrence mode, has been promoted by a wide coalition of scholars and jurists. In response, various critics of instrumentalism have argued for the autonomy of tort law, first under the umbrella of corrective justice and later under civil recourse. The success of civil recourse depends in part on its ability to explain emerging areas of focus in tort law. One such area is public nuisance, which, despite some setbacks, is viewed by the plaintiffs bar, state actors, and some members of the academy as an effective tool to address significant social problems, such as the opioid crisis. This article asks whether, and how, civil recourse theory can accommodate modern public nuisance law.

Author(s):  
Barbara H. Fried

The essays collected in this book take stock of the nonconsequentialist project over the past fifty years, in two key areas. The first part focuses on the moral “duty not to harm” others. Under a suitably broad definition of harm, that duty encompasses most of the restrictions imposed on individual conduct in the secular, liberal state. It examines how that duty has been cashed out in ostensibly nonaggregative terms in the principal strains of nonconsequentialist thought: tragic choices (trolleyology), libertarian property rights, corrective justice in tort law, and Scanlonian contractualism. Nonconsequentialists have not only failed to articulate a viable alternative to aggregation in this domain; they are doomed to fail, because in a world of scarcity (in the broadest sense) and epistemic uncertainty, everything we do poses some risk of harm to others’ fundamental interests, a conflict that can be resolved only through aggregation. The second part examines the treatment of distributive justice in nonconsequentialist political theory over the past fifty years, focusing on Nozickian libertarianism, Rawlsianism, left-libertarianism, and social contractarianism. It argues that whatever the moral attractiveness of the various distributive schemes proposed, none is logically entailed by the normative premises from which it is ostensibly derived. Unlike the argument in the first part, this is not an argument for consequentialism by logical elimination. Societal wealth need not be, and almost never is, distributed to optimize consequences. Rather, it underscores the relatively weak justifications that have been offered for some very strong conclusions.


Author(s):  
Balganesh Shyamkrishna

This chapter examines the relationship between private law and constitutional law in India, with particular emphasis on tort law. It considers the Indian Supreme Court’s expansion of its fundamental rights jurisprudence over the past thirty years, as well as its effort to transcend the public law/private law divide. It also explains how the Court’s fusion of constitutional law and tort law has affected the independent efficacy, normativity, and analytical basis of equivalent private law claims in India. It argues that the Court’s efforts have only undermined the overall legitimacy of private law mechanisms in the country, and that this phenomenon is evident not only with respect to tort law, but also to a lesser degree in other areas of private law, such as contract law and property law.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.


2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Carson

Abstract Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobiles and floppy disks?? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound, but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of The Public Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is simply passéé. Instead he offers a ““Plan B”” that takes account of the new way that learners today organize information to make history meaningful.


Author(s):  
Ramnik Kaur

E-governance is a paradigm shift over the traditional approaches in Public Administration which means rendering of government services and information to the public by using electronic means. In the past decades, service quality and responsiveness of the government towards the citizens were least important but with the approach of E-Government the government activities are now well dealt. This paper withdraws experiences from various studies from different countries and projects facing similar challenges which need to be consigned for the successful implementation of e-governance projects. Developing countries like India face poverty and illiteracy as a major obstacle in any form of development which makes it difficult for its government to provide e-services to its people conveniently and fast. It also suggests few suggestions to cope up with the challenges faced while implementing e-projects in India.


2016 ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Patryk Kołodyński ◽  
Paulina Drab

Over the past several years, transplantology has become one of the fastest developing areas of medicine. The reason is, first and foremost, a significant improvement of the results of successful transplants. However, much controversy arouse among the public, on both medical and ethical grounds. The article presents the most important concepts and regulations relating to the collection and transplantation of organs and tissues in the context of the European Convention on Bioethics. It analyses the convention and its additional protocol. The article provides the definition of transplantation and distinguishes its types, taking into account the medical criteria for organ transplants. Moreover, authors explained the issue of organ donation ex vivo and ex mortuo. The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine clearly regulates the legal aspects concerning the transplantation and related basic concepts, and therefore provides a reliable source of information about organ transplantation and tissue. This act is a part of the international legal order, which includes the established codification of bioethical standards.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
Benjamin Baez

Abstract In these preliminary reflections, I propose a re-reading of left-leaning political projects’ attachment to the liberal idea of the “public.” I will argue that this attachment is a wounded one that forces nostalgia for the past and prevents dealing with present realities. I want us to attend to this notion of the public by attending to some ideas in psychoanalysis, particularly Sigmund Freud’s and specifically those of mourning and melancholia. This reading does not purport expertise in psychoanalysis and does not offer any kind of psychological diagnosis. I intend on reading psychoanalysis as allegory, as offering us imaginative devices for thinking about the present.


Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

As it had been in the communal age, so, in the Visconti-Sforza era, law was the instrument that the public authority relied upon in order to subordinate the many actors present and to subjugate their political cultures. There is, therefore, the attempt to tighten a vice around competing powers—a vice that is at the same time legislative, doctrinal, and judicial. And yet, it is difficult to escape the impression of an effort whose outcomes were somewhat more uncertain than had been the case in the past. The chapter focuses on all these aspects of the deployment of legal and other stratagems to consolidate or to wrest power.


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