From Aristotle’s ʻArithmetic Proportion’ to Ménage-à-trois – Anglo-American Justice Theories in the Context of Norwegian Tort Law

Abstract

The Anglo-American debate on the philosophical foundations of tort law has inspired Nordic tort scholars to scrutinise national tort law in new ways over the past decade. This article argues that Norwegian scholarship has (hitherto) not sufficiently taken into account whether and how Anglo-American justice theories fit their new legal surroundings. Norwegian tort law works within the distributive framework of an active welfare state, and so the presence of a distributive element in that law thus seems more intrusive than in any Anglo-American tort law landscape. In the author’s opinion, the import of Anglo-American justice theories should be based on a holistic approach, which takes into account how different justice theorists deal with the distributive element in tort law. In short, if we are going to import Anglo-American justice theories in order to explain (justify) Norwegian tort law, we need to make sure we import a theory that explains (justifies) the main features of that tort law. As part of the analysis, the article suggests a reading of Weinrib’s, Coleman’s and Gardner’s accounts of justice in the context of Norwegian tort law, in particular the Victim’s Compensation Act.

Keywords

• Corrective and distributive justice
• tort law
• Victim’s Compensation Act
• Nordic welfare state
• Correctiveanddistributivejustice
• tortlaw