Maryland Law Review Volume 64 | Issue 1 Article 8 Causation and Responsibility: the Compensation Principle from Grotius to Calabresi Francesco Parisi Vincy Fon Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr Part of the Torts Commons Recommended Citation Francesco Parisi, & Vincy Fon, Causation and Responsibility: the Compensation Principle from Grotius to Calabresi, 64 Md. L. Rev. 108 (2005) Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol64/iss1/8 This Conference is brought to you for free and open access by the Academic Journals at DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Maryland Law Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CAUSATION AND RESPONSIBILITY: THE COMPENSATION PRINCIPLE FROM GROTIUS TO CALABRESI FRANCESCO PARISI* & VINCY FON** ABSTRACT Calabresi often lamented that insufficient consideration had been given in the legal and economic literature to the idea of distrib- uting an accident loss among a faultless tortfeasorand an innocent victim on the basis of the relative causal contributions of the parties to the loss. This criterion of apportionment of liability, which Cala- bresi calls "comparativecausation, " is the subject of this Article. We present a brief intellectual history of the principle of comparative cau- sation and provide a positive economic model that explains the rise and fall of this criterion of liability in historical and contemporary societies. In order to identify the structuralfeatures of this standard, we consider how a rule of comparative causation would perform in the absence of other liability rules when applied as a general and sole basis of liability.