Foreseeable threats to life such as from accidents, disease, and natural disasters, demand both preventive and reparative action from the authorities, and such action must be of a minimum level of competence. The General Comment on the right to life issued by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2015 stipulates that the African Charter demands that States act to protect life against threats from natural disasters, famines, and outbreaks of infectious diseases.

This chapter considers whether, and if so, how, the right to life may be violated by pollution and, at the least, a wilful failure to seek to tackle climate change. A serious violation of international environmental law leading to death is ipso facto violative also of the right to life. This includes also the situation where environmental pollution in one State affects the environment and the population in another. Pollution has a significant and growing impact on the lives of children. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), lower respiratory infections are among the largest causes of mortality in children, accounting for 15% of deaths in 2015. In 2020, a death certificate in England listed air pollution as a cause of death for the first time.

The IoT raises several questions germane to traditional products liability law and the UCC’s warranty provisions. These include how best to evaluate and remedy consumer harms related to insecure devices, malfunctioning devices, and the termination of services and software integral to a device’s operations. Consider that the modern IoT vehicle with an infotainment system generates massive quantities of data about drivers, and that mobile applications can be used to impact the operations of these vehicles.

Duty of care in an educational context is concerned with the safety and wellbeing of students. It is a term we hear all the time in schools. It is imperative to have a clear understanding and working knowledge of when and where the duty is owed and where it is not. Duty of care is part of the tort of negligence where typically a student becomes injured on school grounds or at a school event and his or her family wants to seek a remedy. This is usually in the form of financial compensation for the loss suffered and for any ongoing treatment costs. The circumstances in which a plaintiff is likely to proceed and win a case in the tort of negligence is now well established in law. This chapter discusses the duty of care and how it operates in schools. The discussion covers the defences used by schools to reduce or avoid their responsibility in such matters. The second half of the chapter outlines several of the significant judicial cases in school law, highlighting what they have decided about the liability and legal position of schools and school authorities.

This chapter focuses on comparison. It considers the effect on access to justice of abolishing the assizes and disposing of court buildings. Civil procedure has been transformed, formalism is less important, but there is eternal tension between practical efficiency and desire for absolute justice. Land law is less dominant today, even though for the first time a majority of householders are freehold-owners. Torts law has been transformed by the ever-expanding boundaries of negligence, though contract law looks very similar. While public law has moved in several new directions, judicial review’s roots are Elizabethan. Most of today’s human rights were recognised then. Judicial decisions have changed in character as a result of abolishing the civil jury; the public is less involved with traditional-type law. Debt-collection aside, horizontal disputes are less prominent than vertical claims, and tribunals have grown in importance. The complexity of statute-law and regulation today means that citizens have less understanding of the law than Elizabethans. One consequence is that the legal profession is ten times larger (in proportion to the population) than that of Elizabethan England.

In this chapter, I move on to resulting normative questions about the culpability principle, causal contribution, and command responsibility. I engage in deontic analysis of what type of contribution the culpability principle actually requires, and whether the requirement might be reconceived.

First, I will examine why criminal law requires causal contribution, and the degree of contribution required. I will argue that the requirement in relation to accessories is not onerous; ‘risk aggravation’ satisfies the culpability principle.

Second, I consider ambitious proposals to re-imagine culpability, i.e. to develop a new deontic account that does not require any causal contribution. A theme of this book is that ICL can present us with new questions that can lead us to adjust our basic assumptions from criminal law theory. On this issue, however, although the arguments are intriguing, my conclusion is that on a coherentist all-things-considered judgement, they are as yet far too tentative and undeveloped to provide a convincing basis for criminal sanctions. Accordingly, the current best theory is that accessories must at least elevate the risk of the crimes occurring.

Science fiction writers have frequently wrestled with questions relating to the ability of humans to understand the minds of robots and synthetic intellects. These works often portray robotic minds as functioning differently from those of humans. In some cases, analysis of someone’s mental processes and responses to specific situations is the only way to distinguish a human being from a robot. For example, one prominent protagonist in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot collection of short stories is Dr. Susan Calvin, who is described as being a trailblazer the field of robot psychology. In Asimov’s stories, Dr. Calvin is the head “robopsychologist” for the fictional firm U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Incorporated. When a politician named Stephen Byerley runs for mayor of an unnamed major US city, Dr. Calvin is asked to determine if Byerley is a human being or a robot.

Chapter 7 attempts to define accurately the standard of care adopted by Maimonides in his Code with respect to four categories of damage: (1) damage caused by a person to the property of another, (2) damage caused by a person who injures another, (3) damage caused by property, and (4) murder. In relation to each of these four categories, Maimonides proposed a standard of care that lies on the scale between fault, negligence, and strict liability. A careful examination of Maimonides’ writings reveals that he favored different liability regimes for different categories of damage. We present a scheme that illustrates Maimonides’ differential model and explains its rationale with respect to the hierarchy in the different standards of care applied in different cases. We also describe the historical background, circumstances, and nature of the tortfeasors in Maimonides’ time and in the contemporary era. This is essential for an understanding of the differential liability model in itself and as compared to contemporary models. Maimonides’ tort theory, we argue, is based upon a fundamental distinction between two questions: (1) upon whom should tort liability be imposed and (2) what is the standard of care that should be imposed in each case.

In Chapter 2 we will present the difficulties facing those who seek to understand Maimonides’ tort theory as it appears in the Code alone, and according to the common interpretation (the “yeshivah reading”). Several contemporary scholars, as well as rabbis from the Lithuanian yeshivot, identified a different element as an alternative to the element of peshiah, i.e., the element of ownership, and some say ownership and strict liability, by virtue of which liability is imposed for damage caused by a person’s property. We will examine this approach critically and conclude that it does not accurately reflect Maimonides’ position, for it raises serious difficulties, both conceptual-principled and exegetical. We will point to a trend of new explanations of the Jewish sources through the speculum of the common tort theories in the twentieth century in the world of Jewish law. Chapter 2 will leave us with many open questions, which will be answered in the subsequent chapters. The book contains three main parts: (a) Questions; (b) Answers; and (c) Dialogue. Chapter 2 presents the questions to be dealt with in the book. Chapters 3–6 supply answers, and Chapters 7–8 offer a dialogue between Maimonides and various contemporary tort theories.

Chapter 8 draws some cautious lessons from a contemporary analysis of torts for Maimonides’ theory of torts and vice versa. We offer a full conceptual description of the Maimonidean theory, based on the previous chapters, and also characterize Maimonides as a pluralistic-differential scholar. We show that, as opposed to contemporary approaches to torts, which emphasize law and economics and corrective justice, Maimonides’ approach should be characterized as pluralistic and not monistic. After showing how contemporary approaches shed light on Maimonides’ approach, we can move in the opposite direction; that is, we can draw some careful – but important – lessons from the Maimonidean theory for contemporary tort law. We suggest one possible way of learning lessons from Maimonides’ theory for contemporary law, which may help enrich the current tort law discourse. The argument that Maimonides is a true pluralist enables us to draw a careful comparison between Maimonidean and contemporary pluralistic approaches to tort law, such as those of Glanville Williams, Fleming James Jr., Izhak Englard, Gary Schwartz, Mark Geistfeld, Christopher Robinette, Steven Burton, John Goldberg, and Benjamin Zipursky. This comparison reveals differences among the approaches, as well as advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

AI has the potential to be substantially safer than people. Self-driving cars will cause accidents, but they will cause fewer accidents than people. Because automation will result in substantial safety benefits, tort law should encourage its adoption as a means of accident prevention. Under current laws, suppliers of AI tortfeasors are strictly responsible for their harms. A better system would hold them liable for harms caused by AI tortfeasors in negligence. Not only would this encourage the use of AI after it exceeds human performance, but also the liability test would focus on activity rather than design, which would be simpler to administer. More importantly, just as AI activity should be discouraged when it is less safe than a person, human activity should be discouraged when it is less safe than an AI. Once AI is safer than a person and automation is practicable, human tortfeasors should be held to the standard of AI behavior.

Action and responsibility are often linked to control, but skilled behavior reveals a tension in the way we think about control: control is sometimes thought to require flexibility, other times reliability. Yet, flexibility and reliability compete with one another, as we see in skilled behavior; the habituation behind skill provides more reliability, but less flexibility. Thus, accounts of intentional action are split on how to handle skilled behavior. I call this the “problem of skilled behavior” – skilled behavior seems both more and less within our control, so how can we account for it within a unitary model of control? Most traditional accounts adopt a unitary model of control within a "dual-process" model of behavior, which treats all behavior as either controlled or automatic, or some combination of these. I suggest instead a "hierarchical model" of behavioral control, in which behavior can benefit from either attention-based control, which has the benefit of flexibility, or strategic automaticity, which has the benefit of reliability. I argue that action and responsibility can be based in either form of control against "attention-for-action" theorists, such as Fridland and Wu.

The regulation of injured workers across the globe is plagued by ableism and sanism. When workers are injured at work, there is a pervasive approach of discriminating against workers who have been mentally injured at work. This discrimination manifests, inter alia, in the legal tests used to determine whether a worker injured at work should obtain protection and the extent of that protection. The roles of ableism and sanism in workers’ compensation and employer negligence laws is expressly provided for in statute, and supported by countless judgments in all jurisdictions analysed in this monograph.