Contribution to Book
Enterprise Liability
Forthcoming in Research Handbook on Corporate Liability
(2023)
Abstract
In American tort law “enterprise liability” is a response to the profound transformation of the social world
brought about by modern industrial, technological society. In this world, most accidental harm is not the
random byproduct of isolated individuals going about their idiosyncratic existences in civil society. Instead, the
harms and wrongs characteristic of modern social life are the inevitable, and predictable, byproduct of the basic
productive activities of modern life. Enterprise liability expresses the idea that responsibility for these harms
and wrongs should be absorbed by the activities that engender them, and then be distributed across all those
who benefit from those activities —not left on the individuals who happen either to inflict or to suffer them.
This chapters seeks to explains the institutional logic of, and normative justification for, enterprise liability,
and to show how and why it constitutes a distinctive regime of responsibility.
Keywords
- enterprise,
- activity,
- tort,
- characteristic risk,
- institutional responsibility
Disciplines
Publication Date
2023
Editor
Martin Petrin & Christian Witting
Publisher
Edward Elgar
Citation Information
Gregory C. Keating. "Enterprise Liability" Forthcoming in Research Handbook on Corporate Liability (2023) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gregorykeating/45/