Bibliographic record
Abstract
The familiar principle that there is no liability for nonfeasance but only for misfeasance is often presented as reflecting a merely factual difference between acts and omissions and is discussed as a discrete issue in tort law, alongside and after the treatment of general principles. In striking contrast, Francis Bohlen took this distinction to be normative, not factual, and wrote that none is more deeply rooted in and more fundamental to the common law. This article investigates whether his contention is sound and, if so, how it might be accounted for. Its main thesis is that, properly understood, the misfeasance requirement is a central organizing normative idea in private law, providing a unifying moral framework for specifying the varieties of private-law relations. Part ii fixes the meaning and the role of misfeasance through a discussion of a variety of situations in which the law denies liability for even foreseeable loss. We see that the misfeasance requirement makes a certain kind of protected interest, namely, an exclusive ownership interest, the necessary condition of liability in private law. But the character of this ownership and of the sort of relation that holds between individuals as bearers of this interest requires explanation. Moreover, the fact that misfeasance makes this the only relevant conception of protected interest needs to be justified from a moral point of view. Part iii provides an account of the conceptual–normative genesis of the basic private-law relation of rights and correlative duties involving interests of this kind, with illustrations drawn from different areas of private law. Parts iv and v take up the further question of the moral acceptability of the misfeasance requirement from the standpoint of liberal justice.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".