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The lack of a social scientific foundation across the field of negligence means that social life and scientific knowledge are transformed and mutated by a negligence paradigm that is unable to fulfil the social purposes typically attributed to it. Analysing the extent to which the reparation ideal has polluted and confused attempts to find radical alternatives to negligence, this book argues for a critical separation between the issue of harm minimisation and reparation; a separation that, it is argued, provides the basis for a different policy approach to the human experience of injury, error and misfortune.
List of contents
Introduction: Disconnections and Aspirations PART ONE: MAKING NEGLIGENCE SOCIAL (SCIENTIFIC) 1. What Negligence Knows: Stories, Myths and Assumptions 2. The Law & Society Disconnect: The Expertise Paradox 3. Determining the Indeterminate: The Knowledge Paradox 4. Humanising Negligence: The Egalitarian Paradox PART TWO: SOCIAL LIFE BEYOND NEGLIGENCE 5. What Negligence Becomes: Translating Purpose 6. Approaches to Social Problems 7. Legal Multi-Tasking: Beyond Compensation 8. Managing Complexity: With and Without Law Conclusion: Ergonomic Architectures: With and Without Negligence
About the author
Nicky Priaulx is based at Cardiff Law School
Summary
Beyond the Negligence Paradigm offers a novel engagement with key problems and failings which have long been identified with the operation of the negligence system. Connecting a broad range of critical approaches in private legal theory that laments the disconnection between negligence and the 'real world', the author analyses the various obstacles – including the very nature of law and scientific knowledge – which make inevitable a difficult and incomplete intersection. Illustrating how a stronger appreciation of the nature of science helps to achieve a better appreciation of law, in particular underpinning the importance of exploring non-legal approaches, the author seeks to provide a fresh vantage point from which policy-makers and socio-legal scholars can identify new and more honest strategies for addressing and managing the incidence of error, accidents and injury. Recommending a de-centring of negligence-style thinking, the work argues in favour of a more open-ended inquiry about the mechanics of social life and our ignorance of it.
