Dorfman on the Asymmetric Standard of Care in Negligence

Avi Dorfman has posted to SSRN Negligence and Accommodation.  The abstract provides:

Whereas the Restatement of Torts as well as leading economic and justice-based approaches to the explanation of the standard of reasonable care advocate symmetric measurement of reasonable care across the defendant/plaintiff distinction, this article demonstrates that, in fact, the law applies this standard asymmetrically. Defendants are expected to discharge an objectively-fixed amount of care, whereas plaintiffs are for the most part assessed by reference to a subjective measurement of reasonable care. Normatively, I argue that an asymmetric assessment of care, because it combines an unfavorable assessment of defendant’s negligence with a favorable assessment of plaintiff’s negligence, means that the victim gets to fix the terms of the interaction between them. This way of proceeding resonates well with a powerful egalitarian idea of accommodating, rather than overlooking, relevant differences—that is, treating the plaintiff and the defendant differently is necessary for the duty of reasonable care to give effect to the qualitative difference between the life and limb of the former, on the one hand, and the autonomy of the latter, on the other. Asymmetric assessment of due care, I argue, is the doctrinal metric by which the law determines what it is for the plaintiff and the defendant to relate as equals given that difference, which is to say to relate as substantively equals.