In a strange sort of accident, this academic year I’ve ended up teaching tort law. I didn’t set out to do it, really, and I certainly did not grow up thinking “yes, negligence and nuisance, that’s where I’ll plant my flag”. I picked it because I had to pick something, or it was going to be picked for me. One of those institutional inevitabilities, like fire doors that must be kept closed or the fact that the printer in the corridor is always out of toner (good thing that I don’t use that one anymore). I chose it because, faced with the list of core modules, it seemed like the one I would dislike the least. There’s a difference between liking and disliking the least; it’s the margin of survival. However, here I am, some weeks in, and I find myself, absurdly, enjoying it. I’m even starting to see the outlines of moral philosophy wearing the wig of practicality. People injure each other in the most inventive ways, and the law tries to make sense of that. Tort law, in its unassuming way, is about what happens when we collide - not metaphorically, but physically, spatially, perhaps emotionally (I need to read a bit more John Gardner for that). It’s a jurisprudence of clumsiness. Sometimes I think the appeal is similar to cooking. The recipe looks tedious - measure this, reduce that - but somewhere in the process it becomes an act of care. One can ruin the sauce (I haven’t yet, but I still have six months to mess the kitchen up), but when it works there’s a satisfying click. It’s the same sound my guitar string makes when I finally tune it right after it’s been on drop D for weeks (there’s a reason for that, although at 43 I should be ashamed of that reason).
The students, too, are a delight - unexpectedly so. They laugh in the right places, most likely to please me, but they think in ways that surprise me. Some of them seem genuinely interested, which feels like spotting a rare bird in my back balcony. I found myself yesterday morning actually wanting to explain what Donoghue decided, why the very idea of a neighbour (one’s legal neighbour, as Lord Atkin would have it) feels almost biblical: love thy neighbour, but only if the damage was foreseeable. Christianity meets foreseeability: that’s the British compromise in a nutshell.
Obviously it’s not my main thing. My research interests remain where law meets religion, or philosophy, or whatever corner of abstract reason I happen to be chasing that month, but tort, oddly, feels like the place where the law is most alive – at least this term. I think there’s something very democratic about it: someone slipped, someone broke something, someone should have known better, let’s talk about it and try to make some sense of it. And that’s what’s making it unexpectedly fun. Tort is about the fragile choreography of being human in a shared space, without the concept of the divinity to regulate things. The more I read about duty, breach, and causation, the more I realise that behind those tidy categories are the same questions that animate philosophy, football, cooking, even religion: how much do we owe to each other, and when does care become liability?