HKU Private Law and Theory Speaker Series:
Negligence, Real Wrongs, and Relational Legal Redress
Date: March 5, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Venue: Rm 824, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, HKU
I defend the relational or bipolar structure of tort law, specifically the tort of negligence, against an instrumentalist challenge that contends that that structure is merely a formal legal arrangement justified by aggregate social benefits rather than an underlying relational morality constituted by rights and directed duties. I then seek to show that the relational legal redress underwritten by the common law of torts may not just be one way of operationalizing the underlying relational moral reality that I defend it has, it may be the best way of doing so, for alternatives risk alienating us from our moral status.
John Oberdiek writes in tort theory and law and philosophy more broadly and is the author of Imposing Risk: A Normative Framework (Oxford 2017). He has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton as well as a visiting professor at a number of institutions in the United States and abroad, and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Law and Philosophy, Co-Editor of the Oxford Private Law Theory series with Oxford University Press, as well as Co-Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. Professor Oberdiek is the 2023 recipient of the Fred Berger Memorial Prize in Philosophy of Law, awarded by the American Philosophical Association.
Moderator: Peter Chau, Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law