John gardner john Blair Gardner

Life to Private Law.
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The law of tort (or delict) is that part of the law that provides 
individuals with rights of action to obtain redress for wrongs committed against them 
that cause personal injury, damage to property and other similar harms. The law of 
tort is part of what lawyers classify as private law, which includes the law of contract 
and the law of property. Private law invariably entitles one person (the plaintiff) to 
bring a claim against another, usually a claim for damages or financial compensation, 
for a loss that the other person wrongfully caused to the plaintiff—for instance, that 
wrong might consist of an accident causing personal injury, financial loss by breach 
of contract or the misappropriation of another’s property. 
Since the 1970s, a fierce debate had evolved about the nature of the law of tort. 
The traditional ‘moralist’ view was that tort law merely provided isolated measures of 
corrective justice between two individuals. Where a wrong had been identified, on the 
complaint of the plaintiff, the law required the defendant to pay the plaintiff compen-
sation.
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In contrast, various kinds of instrumentalist or consequentialist accounts of 
the law of tort insisted that the purpose of the law should be understood in terms of 
social and economic goals. One goal might be, for instance, achieving compensation 
for accidents rather like a system of insurance. Another goal might be efficiency in the 
59
J. Gardner, Law as a Leap of Faith, p. 192.
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J. Gardner, Torts and Other Wrongs (Oxford, 2019).
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Gardner, From Personal Life to Private Law.
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E.g. J. Coleman, ‘The morality of strict tort liability’ (1976) 18 William and Mary Law Review 259;
J. Coleman, ‘Corrective justice and wrongful gain’ (1982) 11 Journal of Legal Studies 421 (1982), 421;
S. Perry, ‘The moral foundations of tort law’ (1982) 77 Iowa Law Review 449; E. Weinrib, ‘Toward a 
moral theory of negligence law’ (1983) 2 Law and Philosophy 37.

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Hugh Collins and Antony Duff
sense of maximising the wealth of society by imposing liability on those who could, at 
the least cost, avoid the harm caused by accidents.
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These instrumentalist accounts of 
tort law were often not so much an account of legal practice, but rather formed the 
basis of a critique that suggested that tort law was not fit for its social and economic 
purpose and needed reform, even radical reform including abolition. John Gardner 
entered the debate by making the unpopular claim that both sides had valid insights, 
which could even be combined. He then added two important amendments to the 
traditional moral account of the law of tort.
With respect to the debate between the ‘moralists’ and the instrumentalists, 
Gardner argued that all theories should be instrumentalist to some extent. For 
example, he claimed that everyone should accept that tort law, or private law, should 
be efficient.
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Whatever tort law/private law’s goal may be, it should achieve that goal 
as effectively as possible. So he thought that, up to a point, there is no real contest 
between instrumentalist theories and others and that all theories are instrumentalist.
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That is not to say he that agreed with the economists on what tort law should be 
efficient at—certainly not wealth-maximisation. But its goal might be, quite possibly, 
the doing of corrective justice, and, in so far as the doing of corrective justice efficiently 
triggers issues of distributive justice, the doing of distributive justice as well.
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‘We 
should think about which institutional set-up is most efficacious in righting the wrong, 
least wasteful, and most sensitive to the circumstances of the case.’
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At the same time, 
Gardner accepted the emphasis of the moralists on the reasons the law itself gives for 
judgments with regard to torts as a necessary part of an explanation and justification 
of tort law. This emphasis is linked to his deeply held view that legal reasoning in 
private law is a translation of ordinary moral reasoning in a person’s life. 
One important contribution to the moralist account suggested by Gardner was his 
justification of reparative duties. Many traditional accounts of the law of tort hold 
that a tort is a wrong that breached the primary rules that set standards of conduct 
such as a duty of care, for which a court would grant a corrective justice remedy in the 
form of damages under a body of secondary rules that were independent of the 
primary duties of care. Gardner rejected this view in favour of what he described as 
‘the continuity thesis’.
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This thesis states that the reasons which grounded a primary 
63
G. Calibresi, The Costs of Accidents: a Legal and Economic Analysis (New Haven, CT, 1970); R. Posner,
‘A theory of negligence’ (1972) 1 Journal of Legal Studies 1 29.
64
J. Gardner, ‘What is tort law for? Part 1. The place of corrective justice’ (2011) 30 Law and Philosophy 
30 1; and reprinted in Gardner, Torts and Other Wrongs, chapter 2.
65
J. Gardner, ‘Tort law and its theory’, in J. Tasioulas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy