The purpose of this assignment is to give you an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of negligence law and the philosophical issues that it raises.
What is negligence law and is it justified. If so, how and in what respects?
First, write an introductory paragraph. This should be about half a page or less. The paragraph should end in a thesis about what you will argue. This should be short and clear and need not be groundbreaking. An example might be:
“Negligence law is on the whole justified, but not in terms of redressing a particular kind of wrong, but rather as a tool of economic optimization. Evidence for this claim is that negligence law assigns liability to persons for conduct that cannot be considered morally wrong but that is economically wasteful.”
or
“Negligence law is aimed at redressing a kind of moral wrong, but its proximate cause element is poorly tailored to that end, because defendants who act wrongly may escape liability due to circumstances that are morally arbitrary.”
Your thesis can be original or draw on what we have read. It may be useful to position yourself within a debate or issue others have raised.
In this paragraph, you should try to summarize negligence law and the questions that it raises. This is hard because you should not go into detail and so the skill being tested here is how well you understand the basic question we are asking about negligence and so how clearly you can convey this question in a limited space.