Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is now virtually a dogma among contemporary tort scholars that the non-recovery of pure economic loss in a variety of situations may be justified, if at all, only as a special, policy-driven rule that limits the usual operation of general negligence principles, in particular the foreseeability doctrine. This familiar view in turn rests on a further assumption as to the underlying conception of negligence in which the central concept is the standard of care, with the notion of duty being a matter of foreseeability and playing at most a subsidiary and instrumental role. My aim has been to challenge these views through a systematic reconsideration of the rationale for the denial of so-called relational economic loss claims – the longest standing category of non-recoverable pure economic loss. Drawing on the leading cases, I argue that the prevailing policy-driven explanation not only fails to account for core instances of the law but in fact obscures the basis for non-recovery as set out in the decisions. A completely different rationale for non-recovery emerges: one that is rights-based and that has nothing to do with foreseeability, limitations on foreseeability or the usual policy concerns which writers endorse and dispute. Not only does this rationale account for this area of negligence; it also suggests a larger conception of negligence which affirms the autonomy and priority of duty and is both rights-based and relational, in contrast to the dominant model widely assumed by scholars. I argue that it is this alternative conception that not only underlies the law’s treatment of relational economic loss but shows this to be fully consonant with the very same principles of negligence that govern physical loss.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".