Responsibility in Law and Morality

Lawyers who write about responsibility tend to focus on criminal law at the expense of civil and public law; while philosophers tend to treat responsibility as a moral concept,and either ignore the law or consider legal responsibility to be a more or less distorted reflection of its moral counterpart. This book aims to counteract both of these biases. By adopting a comparative institutional approach to the relationship between law and morality, it challenges the common view that morality stands to law as critical standard to conventional practice. It shows how law and morality interact symbiotically, and how careful study of legal concepts of responsibility can add significantly to our understanding of responsibility more generally. At the heart of this book lie two questions: what does it mean to say we are responsible? And, what are our responsibilities? Its aim is not to answer these questions but to challenge some traditional approaches to answering them and more importantly, to suggest fruitful alternative approaches that take law seriously.

Table of Contents:
1. Moral and Legal Responsibility 2. The Nature and Functions of Responsibility 3. Responsibility and Culpability 4. Responsibility and Causation 5. Responsibility and Personality 6. Grounds and Bounds of Responsibility 7. Realising Responsibility 8. Responsibility in Public Law 9. Thinking about Responsibility References Index

About the Author :
For 20 years, Peter Cane taught law at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Since 1997 he has been a Professor of Law in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.

Review :
…an impressive and comprehensive discussion of the treatment of responsibility in the law-a discussion that ranges across nearly every field of law, and across jurisdictions, supported by detailed references to cases and supplemented by knowledgeable summaries of commentary by lawyers, legal philosophers, and moral philosophers. Peter Cane has written an impressively wide-ranging and illuminating booka truly commendable piece of work. Cane's book deserves a large audience among legal, moral, and political philosophers. …it offers a notably clear and robust formulation of a social approach towards responsibility… he has plenty of interesting and illuminating insights to offer…lawyers and philosphers alike will learn a great deal from this careful dissection of topics… This is a wide-ranging, highly sophisticated work which looks at concepts of responsibility in law across a range of areas. 'Responsibility in Law and Morality' is a challenging and valuable book. Although I have criticised Cane's account of responsibilty in this review, I do not wish to leave the reader with the impression that his book is anything but valuable and rewarding it is an illuminating study of responsibilty in law. It is my view that modern lawyers have a great deal to learn from its approach. Accordingly, apart from being essential reading for anyone interested in legal theory, the book has much to teach any lawyer with even the smallest interest in the justifications of legal liability.