Risks and Wrongs

Abstract

This book is concerned with the conflict between the goals of justice and economic efficiency in the allocation of risk, especially risk pertaining to safety. The book approaches the subject from the premise that the market is central to liberal political, moral, and legal theory. The first part of the book rejects traditional rational choice liberalism in favor of the view that the market operates as a rational way of fostering stable relationships and institutions within communities of individuals with broadly divergent conceptions of the good. However, markets are needed most where they are most difficult to create and sustain, and one way to understand contract law in liberal legal theory, according to this book, is as an institution designed to reduce uncertainty and thereby make markets possible.

A Social Contract Account for CSR as an Extended Model of Corporate Governance (II): Compliance, Reputation and Reciprocity

“…Indeed, it is the fact that contracts are generally incomplete which has prompted the current discussion of CSR. On my hypothesis, the social contract amongst the stakeholders is the 'hypothetical contract' which furnishes default or 'gap-filling' rules which complete incomplete contracts (Coleman, 1992). The obligation to fulfil explicit but incomplete contracts hence does not guarantee compliance with the obligations deriving from the hypothetical contract, and this precisely because the explicit contract does not cover matters that the hypothetical contract helps to clarify.…”

Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers

“…If state tort law exists only to serve as an efficient means to regulate risk, preemption may make sense if the federal government can do a better job at doing so. In recent years, Jules Coleman and several other tort theorists have argued that an important function of tort law is to provide corrective justice-to provide a procedure to right wrongs (Coleman, 1992;Zipursky, 2003). Federal preemption eliminates the state remedy without replacing it with any equivalent procedure.…”

The Ethics of Business in Wartime

“…The intuition goes that if there is a threat of unjust harm to one person, and someone else is morally responsible for such a threat, as a matter of equity, if the harm has to be distributed-that is, if there is a choice about who is going to be injured-it ought to be imposed upon the person who is morally responsible for the fact that someone has to be harmed (Coleman 1992). By being morally responsible for a threat of unjust harm, a person makes himself liable to be harmed in self-defense.…”