Rationalising Tort Law for the Twenty-First Century

This paper starts from the premise that incoherence reigns in large parts of our law of tort and that this is a major barrier to the communication of its key tenets to the wider public and informed debate about its future. It accordingly makes three proposals for rationalising tort law for the twenty-first century: (1) rationalising the bases of tortious liability (do we really need 70+ torts?); (2) separating the functions of compensating loss and protecting rights; and (3) re-framing the debate about the duty of care in terms of protective scope.