John Gardner, the youngest person ever to become a professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, gave a lecture yesterday that evaluated corrective justice as an answer to the question, "What is Tort Law For?"
A tort is defined by Gardner in his research paper, "Backward and Forwards with Tort Law" as "a kind of legal wrong, a breach of a legal obligation," rather than contractual obligation, where legal obligation is owed "to somebody in particular."
Gardner explained that there are currently two "warring families of theories" of tort law. One family comprised of instrumentalist theorists believes that "the point of tort law is the control of social costs."
The other family "thinks of tort law as the home of principles of justice, more particularly of something called corrective justice." It is precisely this issue of corrective justice that Gardner chose to evaluate in his lecture.
So what is corrective justice? Gardner explained that norms of justice, which are "norms specifically for tackling allocative moral questions," come in various types.
It was Aristotle who first explained the difference between norms of corrective justice and norms of distributive justice, Gardner said. In mathematical terms, according to Aristotle, the norms of distributive justice can be likened to the model of division. If we have a certain number of holders of certain goods, how do we divide the goods up?
Norms of corrective justice are modeled after addition and subtraction, where there are only two holders of goods, one from which the goods have been taken, and the other who took the goods to begin with. The question of corrective justice, deals with allocating the goods back to whom they were taken from, Gardner said.
Besides trying to correct torts that have already been committed, tort law also serves to "deter the commission of torts that have not yet been committed." Examples of this can be shown from the large number of corporations that have today become "fixated with not committing torts" simply because of the "potentially vast" liabilities to pay reparative damages to those whom they wrong.
Gardner ended his lecture with an unanswered question regarding the role of moral norms of corrective justice and their application to the law of unjust enrichment.
His lecture was well received by the professors who comprised at least a third of the audience.
The event was co-hosted by the legal studies group; a group comprised of associate faculty at Dartmouth with a common interest in legal studies, the Dartmouth Lawyers Association and the Nelson Rockerfeller Center.