Proefschrift: Strict liability and the aims of Tort Law

Proefschrift: Strict liability and the aims of Tort Law

In the law of torts (civil liability), a person can be held liable in certain circumstances even if he or she cannot be said to have been at fault for the damage the victim suffered. The term of art for this form of liability is strict liability. This PhD thesis contributes to the comparative law and legal-theoretical debates around strict liability. After comparing two jurisdictions with opposite approaches to strict liability (France and England), the researcher argues that when legal systems chose for strict liability, they were not infringing on any precepts of corrective justice. Instead, by choosing strict liability over fault-based liability, legal systems implicitly opt for a different distribution of primary rights and duties, and therefore only considerations of distributive justice can justify such a choice.