Center for Law, Language, and Cognition Workshop
Liability for Risk: Citizens' Perspectives on Liability for Loss of Chance
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. Talk and reception

RSVP online Read draft of paper

Speakers:
Professor John Darley, Princeton University
Associate Dean Lawrence Solan, Brooklyn Law School
Matthew Kugler, Princeton University
Professor Joseph Sanders, University of Houston Law Center

A group of scholars from the fields of law and psychology will present a series of studies concerning people’s reactions to the imposition of liability for creating risk in others, absent actual injury. When two people perform similarly bad acts, but only one of them causes injury, the system often treats the lucky perpetrator far better than the one whose conduct resulted in actual harm. This problem is referred to as loss of chance in the tort literature, and as moral luck in the philosophical literature.

Studies conducted by the authors show that people care a great deal about a perpetrator’s state of mind when damages are awarded or sanctions meted out, regardless of whether actual injury has occurred; that there is a moral luck component to people’s judgments; and that they appear to distinguish, at least to some extent, the differing purposes of tort law (corrective justice) and criminal law (retributive justice).