Beyond the Negligence Paradigm: Developing a Regulatory Ergonomic Approach to Error and Injury

Beyond the Negligence Paradigm offers a novel engagement with key problems and failings which have long been identified with the operation of the negligence system. Connecting a broad range of critical approaches in private legal theory that laments the disconnection between negligence and the ‘real world’, the author analyses the various obstacles - including the very nature of law and scientific knowledge - which make inevitable a difficult and incomplete intersection. Illustrating how a stronger appreciation of the nature of science helps to achieve a better appreciation of law, in particular underpinning the importance of exploring non-legal approaches, the author seeks to provide a fresh vantage point from which policy-makers and socio-legal scholars can identify new and more honest strategies for addressing and managing the incidence of error, accidents and injury. Recommending a de-centring of negligence-style thinking, the work argues in favour of a more open-ended inquiry about the mechanics of social life and our ignorance of it.