Shareholders of corporations have their liability for actions of the corporation limited by law. Unlike the equity holder in a partnership or proprietorship, the assets that a shareholder has distinct from her holdings in the enterprise can not be taken to satisfy liabilities arising from actions of the enterprise itself. This paper argues that a reasonable principle of fairness argues for an alternative to limited liability, proportional liability. Proportional liability makes a shareholder liable for (...) the same proportion of a corporation''s excess of liabilities over assets that her number of shares bears to the total number of shares outstanding. The key idea is that it is unfair in situations in which explicit agreements can not be reached for shareholders to bear only limited risk when they may receive gains from stock dividends and appreciation that are not limited to any pre-determined amount. Proportional liability has not been much examined in the financial literature. Good utilitarian arguments have been given for limited liability over unlimited liability for corporate shareholders, but these arguments do not clearly support the choice of limited liability over proportional liability. (shrink)

Among the most complicated issues in the law of delict, in the case of multiple debtors, is to determine the scope of each co-debtor’s liability. The rule of proportional liability clearly favours debtors more than the aggrieved party. And, on the contrary, the solidary liability best suits the interests of the aggrieved party as the risk of co-debtor’s insolvency is transferred to the debtors. Furthermore, in the latter case, the debtors who attempt to allocate the scope (...) of their liability among themselves and fail to reach an agreement have to undergo two legal procedures: the first concerning the compensation to the creditor, and the second concerning the determination of the scope of their liability among themselves. Adequate balancing of the interests of the two parties (the debtor and the creditor) lies among the major tasks of tort law. Therefore, he law should seek specific rules instrumental in determining the scope of the co-debtor’s liability in the case of multiple debtors. The application of the rule of solidary liability is based on the assumption that individuals whose joint actions inflicted damage must compensate it together. (shrink)

Judges and juries often make factual decisions even if the facts are disputed and there is no clear-cut evidence available. Despite this common state of uncertainty, verdicts are thought of as having clear winners and losers––either the plaintiff wins and receives a full remedy, or the defendant wins and the plaintiff gets nothing. In private disputes, factfinders base their binary factual determinations on the preponderance of the evidence. There are, however, several doctrines that allow for partial remedy, discounted by the (...) probability that the facts support the plaintiff’s case, given the available evidence (proportional liability). This Article offers a general theory for proportional liability in private law. It identifies three types of factual uncertainty—mutual uncertainty, unilateral uncertainty, and institutional uncertainty—and shows that legal economists should support proportional liability when the state of uncertainty is shared by the parties and the court (mutual uncertainty), and they should adopt an all-or-nothing rule whenever the information is observable but unverifiable (institutional uncertainty). In cases where one party holds private information (unilateral uncertainty), proportional liability is sometimes, but not always, superior to an all-or-nothing rule. (shrink)

This essay explores the case against strict liability offenses as part of the more general debate about proportional punishment. This debate takes on a very different look in light of a formal result derived by the authors elsewhere, that is briefly summarized and whose implications are pursued here. Traditional objections that consequentialists have mounted against the deontologists’/retributivists’ defense of proportionality fall by the wayside, but a new threat to the proportionality requirement replaces it: the ease with which any (...) such requirement can be circumvented. (shrink)

This Article presents a theory whereby criminal punishments are routinely distributed in proportion to the weight of the evidence mounted against the defendant. According to this theory, the law relaxes the stringent decision threshold in criminal trials—beyond a reasonable doubt—by creating easy-to-prove evidentiary offenses. These offenses, in turn, are associated with less severe sanctions, thus creating a de-facto proportional liability regime. Against that backdrop, the Article examines the legal duty to report criminal activity to the authorities. As the (...) analysis shows, while legal scholars analyzing such duties have focused on the paradigmatic case in which an innocent bystander, friend or family member is unwittingly exposed to information about a crime, in practice these duties are rarely used in such cases. Rather, reporting duties are used to prosecute suspected accomplices whose involvement in the commission of the actual crime is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, offenses imposing a reporting duty on criminal activity turn out to be part of the general framework of accomplice liability, and are used to apply less severe sanctions in cases of evidentiary uncertainty. (shrink)

When harm is caused by multiple injurers, damages are allocated among the responsible injurers in proportion to their relative responsibility for harm. This Article shows that a proportional allocation of liability between strictly-liable injurers distorts incentives to take precautions. The effects of this distortion depend on the nature of the injurers’ precautions. If precautions are complements, injurers compete for lower liability shares, which results in excessive care-taking. If precautions are substitutes, injurers are afflicted by moral hazard, which (...) gives rise to insufficient care-taking. By illuminating injurers’ strategic incentives, this Article highlights a tension between equity and efficiency under a proportional allocation of liability. (shrink)

Is the negligence standard in accident law acceptable to the egalitarian? The egalitarian - the egalitarian who would compensate only losses for which the actor was not responsible - cannot accept either a system of strict liability for all accidents or a system of social insurance for all accidents. A system of tort law acceptable to the responsibility - egalitarian must be a system based on negligence. But what will negligence mean? A negligence system in which the notion of (...) reasonableness is based on efficiency, I argue, is a system that redistributes wealth from the less well off to those better off. I consider alternative notions of reasonableness, ending up with a principle of proportional responsibility and distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial cases. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan famously defends a moral inequality of combatants, where liability to be attacked and potentially killed in war, should be grounded in the individual combatant’s moral responsibility for posing an unjust threat. In a response, Seth Lazar shows that McMahan’s criterion for liability leads to an unacceptable dilemma between “contingent pacifism” and “total war”, i.e. between war being practically infeasible, or implausibly many civilians being legitimate targets. The problem is that McMahan grounds liability mainly in the (...) individual’s causal responsibility for posing an unjust threat, but where a large proportion of combatants and civilians are approximately equally causally responsible. Recently, Saba Bazargan has come to the aid of McMahan by injecting an alternative supplementary criterion for liability, namely the individual’s complicity in a group act. This criterion is supposed to uphold the noted moral inequality, while avoiding the responsibility dilemma, by grounding moral incrimination in the individual’s participatory intention, instead of her causal contribution. I argue that the complicity account fails to resolve the dilemma. It fails because complicity grounded in a causally inert participatory intention is insufficient for liability. Further, I show why this reveals a deeper problem with the complicity account itself, namely that though it purports to ground incrimination non-causally, it fails to do so to any serious extent. (shrink)

Should society intervene to prevent the risky behavior of precocious teenagers even if it would be impermissible to intervene with adults who engage in the same risky behavior? The problem is well illustrated by the legal case of the 13-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker, who set out in 2009 to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone, succeeding in January 2012. In this paper we use her case as a point of entry for discussing the fundamental (...) question of how to demarcate childhood from adulthood. After summarizing the case, we identify a ‘demarcation dilemma’ that frames much of the public and expert debate. On the one hand, it seems morally imperative ‘to treat like alike’, which means that both children and adults should be allowed to undertake all actions for which they have the relevant competences. On the other hand, requiring proportional treatment of children and adults seems to neglect the special nature of childhood as a distinct stage in life that ends at a specific age. We introduce the notion of a ‘regime of childhood’ to deal with this problem. This regime includes several dimensions, including the limited liability for children, the supervisory responsibilities of parents, the role of age-based thresholds, and the overarching purpose of childhood as a context for developing autonomy. We argue that, all things considered, there are good reasons not to shift to a regime that offers individual children the option of qualifying for adulthood on the basis of age-neutral criteria. (shrink)

Autonomous AI agents present transformative opportunities and significant governance challenges. Existing frameworks, such as the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, fall short of addressing the complexities of these agents, which are capable of independent decision-making, learning, and adaptation. To bridge these gaps, we propose the ETHOS (Ethical Technology and Holistic Oversight System) framework—a decentralized governance (DeGov) model leveraging Web3 technologies, including blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). ETHOS establishes a global registry for AI (...) agents, enabling dynamic risk classification, proportional oversight, and automated compliance monitoring through tools like soulbound tokens and zero-knowledge proofs. Furthermore, the framework incorporates decentralized justice systems for transparent dispute resolution and introduces AI-specific legal entities to manage limited liability, supported by mandatory insurance to ensure financial accountability and incentivize ethical design. By integrating philosophical principles of rationality, ethical grounding, and goal alignment, ETHOS aims to create a robust research agenda for promoting trust, transparency, and participatory governance. This innovative framework offers a scalable and inclusive strategy for regulating AI agents, balancing innovation with ethical responsibility to meet the demands of an AI-driven future. (shrink)

The wrongness of rape -- Rationality and the rule of law in offences against the person -- Complicity and causality -- In defence of defences -- Justifications and reasons -- The gist of excuses -- Fletcher on offences and defences -- Provocation and pluralism -- The mark of responsibility -- The functions and justifications of criminal law and punishment -- Crime : in proportion and in perspective -- Reply to critics.

Improvements in the health capital of citizens are central to the development of countries. By exploiting steep decreases in antiretroviral drug prices and the subsequent increases in antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage, we test whether the resulting improvements in the health of the population are associated with the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity and whether entrepreneurial activity strengthens the relationship between ART coverage and a country’s development. Drawing on a sample of 87 low- and middle-income countries (2006–2019), we find that a 1% (...) increase in ART coverage is associated with a 1.5% increase in the number of newly registered limited liability firms; however, there is no significant relationship with (male or female) self-employment. Higher ART coverage is particularly associated with development—as proxied by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the Human Development Index—in countries with low levels of new business formation and high proportions of self-employment. (shrink)

Firms that wish to be morally responsible in providing products that meet a high standard of safety may face problems competing against firms that make unsafe products and sell these products at cheap prices; these problems may be compounded when consumers do not accurately process information about safety and risk. This paper presents a conceptual argument that the tort system may serve to promulgate information which makes it feasible for firms to market safe products even in the face of these (...) competitive obstacles.To corroborate the conceptual argument, the paper presents the results of an experimental study about the impact of negligence liability information on consumer product safety evaluation. The results show that provision of negligence information heightens consumer concern for safety and firms' ethical behavior, and increases the proportion of consumer choices in favors of the brands sold by manufacturers with a favorable track record for quality. More importantly, they indicate that provision of negligence information reduces the likelihood that brands which conform to inferior safety standards will be chosen by consumers who care about safety standards. (shrink)

Shareholders are sometimes considered to be, in moral terms, the owners of a company, they are after all the carriers of the residual liabilities and bear a higher proportion of the financial risk. However, in company law, the shareholders’ responsibility is limited, and in financial terms shareholders are only liable up to the fully paid value of the share certificate. Moreover, when the shares are sold, the responsibility and risk are transferred completely to the new bearer of the shares. Whether (...) this gap in moral and legal perceptions can be judged to be satisfactory in business ethics terms is a moot point and will be partly explored in this case study which seeks to analyse the shareholder’s responsibility towards a firm in which they own shares. The case study company chosen as a vehicle to explore these issues is that of Turner & Newall; a company that subjected its employees, communities and customers to a major health hazard – asbestosis. This paper will use the Turner & Newall archive materials to illustrate the moral hazards that can arise for shareholders. In particular it will examine the ethical responsibilities of shareholders towards those stakeholders who were exposed to the dangers of asbestos. This case is a significant test of the veracity of the legal system of company control, and exposes the ineffectiveness of that system in accountability terms. The case study also deals with specific issues that arose in the asbestos crisis, as well as with more general issues in our present system of corporate governance and shareholder responsibilities. (shrink)

Standard theories of liability say that X is liable to Y only if Y was harmed, only if X caused Y harm, and (usually) only if X was at fault. This article offers a series of criticisms of each of these claims, and use them to construct an alternative theory of liability in which the nature of X's having imposed a risk of harm on Y is central to the question of when X is liable to Y, and (...) for how much. The article ends with some conjectures on ignorance as an excusing condition. (shrink)

The author investigates the necessity of fault as the prerequisite of contractual civil liability. The author makes the conclusion that Lithuanian law, following most of the countries belonging to the civil law tradition and contrary to the common law systems, as well as Vienna convention, UNIDROIT principles, PECL and DCFR, begins with the theory that fault is a requirement for contractual liability. Strict liability in Lithuanian law is the exception of this general rule. Nevertheless, the author argues (...) that the general rule is subject to important exceptions, and the practical importance of these exceptions is as great as the cases falling within the general rule. In case of no agreement of the parties or any provision of law regarding fault as the necessary prerequisite for contractual liability, in Lithuania, similar to France, the distinction between the obligations to produce a given result and the obligations to use reasonable care is essential: according to Article 6.200(4) of the Lithuanian Civil Code (hereinafter – the CC), a party in breach of an obligation to use best efforts is liable for fault. (shrink)

In this article we use proportional hazards models to examine how low-level processes affect the probability of making a saccade over time, through the period of fixation, during reading. We apply the Cox proportional hazards model to investigate how launch distance (relative to word beginning), fixation location (relative to word center), and word frequency affect the hazard of a saccadic response. This model requires that covariates have a constant impact on the hazard over time, the assumption of (...) class='Hi'>proportional hazards. We show that this assumption is not supported. The impact of the covariates changes with the time passed since fixation onset. To account for the non-proportional hazards we fit step functions of time, resulting in a model with time-varying effects on the hazard. We evaluate the ability to predict the timing of saccades on held-out fixation data. The model with time-varying effects performs better in predicting the timing of saccades for fixations as short as 100 ms and as long as 500 ms, when compared both to a baseline model without covariates and a model which assumes constant covariate effects. This result suggests that the time-varying effects model better recovers the time course of low-level processes that influence the decision to move the eyes. (shrink)

A minimally responsible threatener is someone who bears some responsibility for imposing an objectively wrongful threat, but whose responsibility does not rise to the level of culpability. Minimally responsible threateners include those who knowingly commit a wrongful harm under duress, those who are epistemically justified but mistaken in their belief that a morally risky activity will not cause a wrongful harm, and those who commit a harm while suffering from a cognitive impairment which makes it prohibitively difficult to recognize and (...) act on what is morally required of them. The chapter argues that minimally responsible threateners can indeed be morally liable for the harms they impose. Put differently, culpability is not a necessary basis for liability. (shrink)

Who is responsible when an AI machine causes something to go wrong? Or is there a gap in the ascription of responsibility? Answers range from claiming there is a unique responsibility gap, several different responsibility gaps, or no gap at all. In a nutshell, the problem is as follows: on the one hand, it seems fitting to hold someone responsible for a wrong caused by an AI machine; on the other hand, there seems to be no fitting bearer of responsibility (...) for this wrong. In this article, we focus on a particular (aspect of the) AI responsibility gap: it seems fitting that someone should bear the legal consequences in scenarios involving AI machines with design defects; however, there seems to be no such fitting bearer. We approach this problem from the legal perspective, and suggest vicarious liability of AI manufacturers as a solution to this problem. Our proposal comes in two variants: the first one has a narrower range of application, but can be easily integrated in current legal frameworks; the second one requires a revision of current legal frameworks, but has a wider range of application. The latter variant employs a broadened account of vicarious liability. We emphasise strengths of the two variants and finally highlight how vicarious liability offers important insights for addressing a moral AI responsibility gap. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Jeff McMahan's "Just Cause for War". It defends a more permissive, and more traditional view of just war liability against McMahan's claims.

Adil Ahmad Haque argues that civilians who contribute to unjust lethal threats in war, but who do not directly participate in the war, are not liable to defensive killing. His argument rests on two central claims: first, that the extent of a person’s liability to defensive harm in virtue of contributing to an unjust threat is limited to the cost that she is initially required to bear in order to avoid contributing, and, second, that civilians need not bear lethal (...) costs in order to avoid indirectly contributing to unjust lethal threats. I argue that Haque’s defence of each claim fails. (shrink)

The doxography for Anaximander’s account of the rings of the sky gives proportions for them that are discrepant. So a widely accepted hypothesis proposes that, since the circles of the celestial bodies are compared to wheels, we should add the thickness of their ‘rims’ to the measurements for the celestial rings. This paper proposes an entirely different hypothesis which avoids this awkward expedient by suggesting that there is a ‘geometrical’ reading of the numerical data. The discrepancies can then be explained (...) by there being two different methods for calculating the circumference of the circles. (shrink)

According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no "moral equality of combatants." That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war - but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large number of wars (and in practically all modern wars) where the combatants on the justified side violate the (...) rights of innocent people ("collateral damage"), these combatants are in fact liable to attack by the combatants on the unjustified side. I will support this view with a rights-based account of liability to attack and then defend it against a number of objections raised in particular by Jeff McMahan. The result is that the thesis of the moral equality of combatants holds good for a large range of armed conflicts while the opposing thesis is of very limited practical relevance. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan has argued against the moral equivalence of combatants (MEC) by developing a liability-based account of killing in warfare. On this account, a combatant is morally liable to be killed only if doing so is an effective means of reducing or eliminating an unjust threat to which that combatant is contributing. Since combatants fighting for a just cause generally do not contribute to unjust threats, they are not morally liable to be killed; thus MEC is mistaken. The problem, (...) however, is that many unjust combatants contribute very little to the war in which they participate—often no more than the typical civilian. Thus either the typical civilian is morally liable to be killed, or many unjust combatants are not morally liable to be killed. That is, the liability based account seems to force us to choose between a version of pacifism, and total war. Seth Lazar has called this “The Responsibility Dilemma”. But I will argue that we can salvage a liability-based account of war—one which rejects MEC—by grounding the moral liability of unjust combatants not only in their individual contributions but also in their complicit participation in that war. On this view, all enlistees, regardless of the degree to which they contribute to an unjust war, are complicitously liable to be killed if it is necessary to avert an unjust threat posed by their side. This collectivized liability based account I develop avoids the Responsibility Dilemma unlike individualized liability-based accounts of the sort developed by McMahan. (shrink)

Collective Liability in Islam: The ʿĀqila and Blood-Money Payments. By Nurit Tsafrir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 167. $99.99.

Legal acts of the Republic of Lithuania establish several types of material liability of workers engaged in labour (professional) relations: material liability applied pursuant to the Labour Code of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter referred to as the LC) and material liability applied pursuant to the Law on Public Service of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter referred to as the LPC). In the present article, theoretical and practical aspects of material liability of Lithuanian public servants for (...) material damage caused are analysed. The authors of the article study the conditions for the application of the material liability and identify the main circumstances that must be determined in applying this type of legal compulsion. Furthermore, the authors investigate the relation between the material and disciplinary liabilities, study the limits of the application of labour law norms (that regulate material liability of employees) and civil law norms (regulating personal civil liability) in professional legal relations, identify the means and procedure for solving disputes arising in the application of the material liability. Practical mistakes in the application of the material liability of public servants and violations are analysed on the basis of a rather sparse case-law of the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania related to the material liability. (shrink)

The courts have experienced difficulty in justifying the imposition of liability to third parties for negligent misstatements. The justifications ordinarily invoked relate to notions of assumption of responsibility and detrimental reliance. These can be seen, in turn, to rest upon a normative framework of give and take (or «mutuality») between statement makers and third party recipients. This article challenges the cogency of that normative framework and offers an alternative based upon the remedial nature of tort, which has traditionally focused (...) upon the particular interactions by which wrongdoers have caused harm to others. The most important indicators of liability to third parties relate, in turn, to normatively significant features of the causal sequence between acting and the infliction of harm. These indicators, it is submitted, are (i) actual knowledge of the likelihood of harm if care is not taken and (ii) the tightness of the causal connection. (shrink)

Many climate ethicists maintain that climate policy costs should be borne by those who historically emitted the most greenhouse gases. Some theorists have recently argued, however, that actors only became liable for emitting once the emissions breached legitimate legal regulation governing emissions. This paper challenges this view. Focusing on the climate responsibility of states, it argues that even if we assume that legitimate legal regulation is needed to remove excusable ignorance of entitlements to emit or is constitutive of such entitlements, (...) it does not follow that states should be exonerated from responsibility for all pre-legal emitting. This is because the pre-legal emissions may have violated moral duties not to behave recklessly and to promote the emergence of the relevant regulation. The paper closes by noting how grounding liability for emitting in such duties complicates the link between past emissions and liability. (shrink)

The Moral Responsibility Account of Liability to Defensive Harm (MRA) states that an agent becomes liable to defensive harm if, and only if, she engages in a foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. Advocates of the account contend that liability to defensive harm is best understood as an aspect of distributive justice. Individuals who are liable to some harm are not wronged if the harm is imposed on them, and liability to defensive harm thus (...) helps ensure that harm is borne by whoever has least of an objection of justice against being burdened with it—or so advocates of the MRA insist. In this paper, I argue that liability to defensive harm is not grounded in considerations of distributive justice. While it depends on the wider societal context what allocation of a burden is distributively most just, liability to defensive harm is a distinctly localised affair. I propose that liability to defensive harm is best understood as part of the enforcement dimension of our rights to non-interference. Framing liability in this way does not invalidate the MRA. It does, however, render subjective impermissibility accounts of liability particularly promising. (shrink)

Criminal liability of legal entities was legitimized in the Republic of Lithuania eight years ago, and in the ruling of the Constitutional Court of 8 June 2009, a conclusive confirmation on its accordance with the Constitution was made. It should be noted that the extension of the concept of criminal offense subject has received considerable attention of Lithuanian scientists. It was obvious that this penal law novel would cause many problems and, surely, it has become a reason of many (...) doubts in the judicial practice. However, despite the fact that a fairly broad scientific analysis of the topic under consideration has been made, none of the Lithuanian authors has ever addressed the issue regarding the sources of the criminal liability of legal entities. (shrink)

According to Jonathan Quong’s _moral status account_ of liability to defensive harm, an agent is liable to defensive harm only when she mistakenly treats others as if their moral status is diminished (for example, as if they lack a right that they in fact possess). Quong argues that, by the lights of the moral status account, a conscientious driver (Driver) who faultlessly threatens to kill Pedestrian is not liable to defensive harm. Quong argues that Driver’s action is evidence-relative permissible, (...) despite the risks it imposes, because the general practice of prudent driving is permissible. The practice is permissible because (a) its risks do not disproportionately fall on some groups rather than others, (b) the threatened harms are incidental, and (c) the risk that driving imposes is acceptable in light of the benefits everyone derives from driving. Because the correct moral theory tells us that prudent driving is permissible, Pedestrian lacks a right that Driver refrain from driving. Hence, Driver does not, by driving, treat Pedestrian as lacking a right that Pedestrian in fact possesses. Driver is not liable to defensive force. I argue, against Quong, that cost–benefit analyses of types of risky activity cannot justify individual tokens of risk imposition. Actions that risk incidentally harming others must be justified by the prospective benefits of that token action. Hence, Driver’s imposition of risk on Pedestrian cannot be justified by the benefits of the general practice of driving. I argue that the permissibility of Driver’s imposing risk on Pedestrian via prudent driving turns on whether Driver is willing to internalise at least the foreseeable costs of that risky action. One can lack a right that a person refrain from performing a risky action whilst possessing a right not to be harmed by that risky action. Even if Pedestrian cannot reasonably demand that Driver refrain from driving, she can reasonably demand that Driver refrain from forcing her to bear the costs of his driving. (shrink)

When states perpetrate injustices, do their individual citizens develop liabilities to repair such wrongdoings? Most existing accounts of citizens’ liabilities for state-perpetrated injustices, whilst applicable across certain democratic contexts, struggle to provide robust accounts of the grounds and nature of liabilities for citizens in non-democratic contexts. This problematically leaves a lacuna when it comes to the responsibilities and appropriate responses of citizens in these states. This article advances a distinctive two-pronged authorisation-based account applicable to non-democracies. Objective authorisers are individuals who (...) derive presumptive benefits, are comparably better-off under, and can reliably influence the decision-making processes over the injustice perpetrated by the state. Subjective authorisers are citizens who autonomously endorse their state as credible interpreters and upholders of their aims in relation to the injustices in question. Both objective and subjective authorisers of the state in relation to particular injustices perpetrated, are liable to compensate, actively oppose, and commemorate the victims of state-perpetrated injustices. This account will be shown to be empirically applicable to a large number of minimally decent non-democratic states, where the political elite enjoy moderate popular support over their incorporation and reflection of citizen interests and preferences in their governance, despite the absence of formal democratic electoral mechanisms. This authorisation-based view differs from existing accounts oriented around complicity and participatory intentions, in better accounting for non-participants who are nevertheless intuitively liable for the actions of their authorised state, as well as circumventing structural shortcomings affecting complicity-centric accounts. (shrink)

In the so-called reverse proportional reading :53, 1997), the truth conditions of statements of the form many/few \\ appear to make reference to the ratio of the individuals that are in the extensions of both \ and \ to the individuals that are in the extension of \. The analysis of such readings is controversial. One prominent approach assumes they are a symptom of many and few making reference to a context dependent standard of comparison. We observe that this (...) initially attractive approach systematically undergenerates, failing to capture pervasive reverse proportionality in environments that remove context dependency of the standard. Instead, we propose that reverse proportionality in such cases can arise from the underspecification of the measure function underlying the meanings of many and few. (shrink)

This paper offers an economic analysis of one aspect of the possible liability for incorrect information traded on information markets: expert liability for incorrect asset valuation. The article does not address the questions of whether and under what circumstances an expert should bear contractual liability for an incorrect valuation. Rather, it assumes such contractual liability towards the person who has solicited the opinion and focuses instead on analyzing the circumstances under which the expert’s liability should (...) be extended to third parties as well. (shrink)

This article focuses on the problem of criminal liability for unlawful engagement in economic activities, analyses the emergence and development of this norm in criminal law and the ways of its optimal explanation. Special attention is paid to the problem of identification of illegality of activities, based on specific tax and economic regulation. The study concludes that criminal liability must be limited to a violation of fundamental requirements for the legality of business, and does not include particular abuses (...) occurring in legal business. The author also deals with the criteria of delimitation of criminal and administrative liability for unlawful engagement in economic activities. Under Article 202(1) of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Lithuania, application of criminal liability is limited by two alternative conditions: either a person illegally undertakes activity in entrepreneurial way or on a large scale. According to the paper, the above-mentioned regulation lacks clarity and leads to the risk of unfounded prosecutions. The author gives practical examples, where on the basis of inexplicable criterion of an entrepreneurial way, criminal charges are filed in respect of petty economic activities. Such practice is incompatible with the purposes and principles of criminal law. The paper proposes to delete the criterion of an entrepreneurial way from the definition, leaving the possibility of criminal liability only in case of large scale illegal economic activity. The article also substantiates the conclusion that prohibited business activities provided for in Article 202(2) of the Criminal Code actually defies logical explanation and should be removed from the regulation. At the end of the article, the author offers a sample of optimal legal wording of unlawful engagement in economic activities in criminal law. (shrink)

In 2021, there was a significant amendment to the legislation on medical experimentation. In particular, Chapter 4 of the Law of December 5, 1996 on the Profession of Physician and Dentist (Journal of Laws 2023, item 1516) was amended, in which the prerequisites of legally relevant consent given by the participant in the experiment or by other entities that express a position on their behalf were specified. In addition, procedures related to the opinion of the research project by the so-called (...) bioethics committee were described. Its members were obliged to maintain confidentiality with regard to information obtained in connection with the fulfilled function. These norms became protected by criminal sanctions, set forth in the amended Article 58 of the law. New generic types of criminal acts were introduced, primarily aimed at protecting the participant's right to self-determination, the voluntariness of participation in the experiment, and the confidentiality of data submitted by the experimenters in their proposals to bioethics committees. These norms fill in the gaps that have existed so far in the criminal law protection of these values. The article systematically discusses the generic types of criminal acts that have been penalized in Article 58 (4) to (6) of the referenced law. Their object of protection, object side, subject, subject side, punishability and potential confluence with other regulations are presented. The historical-dogmatic justification for the introduction of these regulations is also shown. (shrink)

A minimally responsible threatener is someone who bears some responsibility for imposing an objectively wrongful threat, but whose responsibility does not rise to the level of culpability. Minimally responsible threateners include those who knowingly commit a wrongful harm under duress, those who are epistemically justified but mistaken in their belief that a morally risky activity will not cause a wrongful harm, and those who commit a harm while suffering from a cognitive impairment which makes it prohibitively difficult to recognize and (...) act on what is morally required of them. The chapter argues that minimally responsible threateners can indeed be morally liable for the harms they impose. Put differently, culpability is not a necessary basis for liability. (shrink)

Should there be civil liability when a person who could easily and without risk rescue another fails to do so? It is argued that the failure to act does not cause the harm that follows, and that the misfeasance/nonfeasance distinction provides no basis for liability. In spite of this, it is maintained that there can sometimes be a duty to rescue, and even a right to be rescued, even in the absence of a voluntary undertaking or an explicit (...) assumption of responsibility.There are convincing arguments for some sort of legal recognition of a duty to rescue, but these arguments do not support tort liability. Nor is a case for tort liability made with the argument that a growth of tort law in this direction would be compatible with the values most centrally involved in the division between torts and contracts. Furthermore, there is a case against tort liability — namely, that the purpose of tort liability is to compensate, that there are certain sorts of situations in which compensation is apposite, and that failure to rescue does not fit into these categories. Criminal liability is the appropriate way for the law to recognize a duty to rescue. (shrink)

Developments in contract law over the past century have led to the proliferation of interpretive theories according to which contract law is no longer a sui generisi legal branch. It is widely accepted that if there is a sui generis contractual obligation, it must somehow be based on the wills of the parties. But a new orthodoxy in contract theory claims that the role of the will of the parties in contract law has been progressively shrinking due to judicial doctrines (...) within the law of contract and also to general statutory provisions. It is no longer apparent that there is any interesting sense in which contractual liability is based on the will of the parties. Hence, so it is claimed, contract law has lost its sui generis nature. The article challenges this new orthodoxy. But rather than reverting to the old orthodoxy—the will theory of contracts (or its contemporary rendition, contract as promise)—it argues that we should resist being forced to choose between them. The article argues that the purpose of contractual liability is to support the practice of voluntary obligations. This view preserves an important connection between contractual liability and voluntary undertakings and meets the objections that beset the will theory. (shrink)

Political contestability is an important issue in the ethical analysis of corporate political activity (hereafter CPA). Though previous studies have proposed analytical frameworks for creating contestable political systems, these studies conceive firm-level factors such as size and wealth as the main (and perhaps, only) determinants of contestability. This relegates the influences of informal managerial-level attributes such as tribalism, especially in ethnically diverse contexts where politics and tribe are inseparable. In this article, I explore the linkages between managers’ tribal identity and (...) political contestability among firms in Ghana. I found that contestability is affected by _tribal consonance_ (similarity) and _tribal dissonance_ (difference) between corporate executives and policymakers. I also found that dissonance creates _liability of tribe_, which causes contestability problems in all four stages of the CPA process—i.e., _political planning_, _political access, political voice_, and _political influence_. Overall, this article extends the micro–macro link of political connections from performance to the ethics of political competition and contestability. It offers important contributions to the literature, advances insightful implications for practice, and outlines useful future research directions. (shrink)

The United Kingdom case R v Lee EWCA Crim 1404 resulted in a pharmacist being convicted for an inadvertent dispensing error and paved way for the decriminalisation of such errors by way of a due diligence defence enacted in 2018. In relation to Hong Kong, what is its legal position for dispensing errors, and can it follow the decriminalising steps of UK? The primary objective of this paper is to explore whether and how HK can reach the normative position for (...) a dispensing error legal regime: I posit that the normative position for healthcare professional liability for dispensing errors should prioritise the public interest of minimisation of future dispensing errors over the retribution of past wrongs; I illustrate HK’s current position for the liabilities of HCPs on dispensing errors, focusing analysis on the relatively controversial aspects of HK’s criminal liability, referencing the landmark cases Hin Lin Yee v HKSAR 13 HKCFAR 142 and Kulemesin v HKSAR 16 HKCFAR 195 to assist my analysis of the requisite mental element for relevant statutory offences; through comparison with UK’s development post-R v Lee and application of Rule of Law principles, HK’s current position is critiqued, coming to the conclusion that while there are compelling reasons for the decriminalisation of dispensing errors in HK, the prerequisite for this to happen is an overhaul of regulatory frameworks by significantly increasing levels of accountability. (shrink)

The responsible corporate officer doctrine is, as a formal matter, an instance of strict criminal liability: the government need not prove the defendant’s mens rea in order to obtain a conviction, and the defendant may not escape conviction by proving lack of mens rea. Formal strict liability is sometimes consistent with retributive principles, especially when the strict liability pertains to the grading of an offense. But is strict liability consistent with retributive principles when it pertains, not (...) to grading, but to whether the defendant has crossed the threshold from noncriminal to criminal conduct? In this essay, I review the two most plausible arguments supporting an affirmative answer in the context of the RCO doctrine. First, perhaps this doctrine reflects a rule-like form of negligence, akin to a rule that prohibits selling alcohol to a minor. Second, perhaps this doctrine expresses a duty to use extraordinary care to prevent a harm. Neither argument is persuasive. The first argument, although valid in some circumstances, fails to explain and justify the RCO doctrine. The second argument, a duty to use extraordinary care, is also inadequate. If “extraordinary care” simply means a flexibly applied negligence standard that considers the burdens and benefits of taking a precaution, it is problematic in premising criminal liability on ordinary negligence. If instead it refers to a higher duty or standard of care, it has many possible forms, such as requiring only a very slight deviation from a permissible or justifiable standard of conduct, placing a “thumb” on the scale of the Learned Hand test, identifying an epistemic standard more demanding than a reasonable person test, or recognizing a standard that is insensitive to individual capacities. However, some of these variations present a gratuitous or incoherent understanding of “negligence,” and none of them sufficiently explain and justify the RCO doctrine. (shrink)

Workplace exposure to SARS-CoV-2 has sickened workers and, subsequently, their family members. Family members might be able to recover from the employer in a negligence action using “take-home” liability theory.

McMahan argues that justification defeats liability to defensive attack (which would undermine the thesis of the "moral equality of combatants"). In response, I argue, first, that McMahan’s attempt to burden the contrary claim with counter-intuitive implications fails; second, that McMahan’s own position implies that the innocent civilians do not have a right of self-defense against justified attackers, which neither coheres with his description of the case (the justified bombers infringe the rights of the civilians) nor with his views about (...) rights forfeiture, is unsupported by independent argument, and, in any case, extremely implausible and counter-intuitive; and third, that his interpretation of the insulin case confuses the normative relations between an agent’s justification and non-liability on the one hand and permissible or impermissible interference with the agent’s act on the other. Similar confusions, fourth, affect his discussion of liability to compensation. (shrink)

In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing—a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant's loss. By contrast, this paper defends a causal theory of partial liability. I argue that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant's loss only to the degree to which the defendant's wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss. I ground this principle in a conception of tort law as a system of corrective justice (...) and use it to critically evaluate different mechanisms for “limiting” liability for consequences of wrongdoing and for “apportioning” liability between multiple wrongdoers. (shrink)

According to Jeff McMahan, a person is liable to be killed in self-defense if the person has acted in such a way that to kill him would neither wrong him nor violate his rights. This account of self-defense has spawned something of a cottage industry in the philosophical literature of such “liability-based accounts.” Liability-based accounts of self-defense, however, are deficient for two reasons. First, they fail to account for the moral residue that remains in the wake of the (...) justified killing of another human being. Second, they are incapable of explaining cases in which people rationally opt not to kill in cases of justified self-defense. As an alternative, the chapter offers a reasons-based account of self-defense and demonstrates its capacity both to avoid counterintuitive views regarding the moral position of those who kill in self-defense and to explain a wider range of salient considerations regarding the morality of self-defense. (shrink)