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This chapter presents a detailed exposition of the Hohfeldian analysis of legal positions (rights, duties, liberties, no-rights, powers, liabilities, immunities, and disabilities). It then presents an overview of the debates between the Interest Theory and the Will Theory of legal rights, after which it champions the Interest Theory at length. Among the questions considered is whether a theory of legal rights must rely on certain ethical assumptions or not.

This chapter gives a compressed account of Bentham's doctrine in a discussion of his theories of legal duty and obligation which he frequently takes as an example of a logical fiction and as a paradigm to exhibit his special method of analysis. Bentham used this doctrine of logical fictions to dissipate the idea that words like ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, and ‘right’ were names of mysterious entities awaiting men's discovery and incorporation of them in man-made laws or social rules. Words like ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, and ‘right’ did indeed, according to Bentham, require special methods of analysis which he invented for logical fictions as a substitute for the straightforward form of definition by genus and species which he held inapplicable to them.

This chapter explores the role of law in overcoming the problem through the imposition of legal duties which limit the purposes for which managerial discretion may legitimately be exercised. The relevant duty is the duty to act bona fide for the benefit of the company. The chapter also concentrates on the role and effectiveness of rule-based standards, and judicial monitoring of compliance with them, as a technique for shaping management behaviour. It also examines the way in which the law has defined the ends for which the directors must exercise their powers. It then addresses the effectiveness of the law as a control technique in holding directors to the ends so specified. In general, the duty to act in the interests of the company (i.e. the shareholders) imposes only a weak control on managerial discretion, since any plausible assertion that a course of action is designed to increase the company's financial well-being will be enough to protect it from attack. It follows that the duty cannot be expected to play a major part in controlling managerialist tendencies.

This chapter argues that civil wrongs are central to remedies. It shows that private law remedies are primarily responsive to wrongs. Furthermore, the stringency of secondary or remedial duties reflects the special moral significance of wrongs as such. This chapter attributes the tendency to discount the normative relationship between wrongs and remedies to lack of clarity on that between primary and secondary moral and legal duties. Here, the justification for secondary legal duties becomes an extension of that for secondary moral duties. This implies that the way forward lies in the clarification of the normative significance of the deontic structure of private law and, in turn, the associated moral aims of private law.

The philosophy of law has tended to concern itself with the structural types of questions, such as whether the normativity of morality can be reduced to the normativity of rational self-interest. Legal positivists, such as John Austin, asserted a clear separation between law and morality, such as by equating the existence of legal duties with the likelihood of the duty-bearer suffering a sanction. However, his critics noted that one might have a legal duty even though one is in fact unlikely to suffer any sanction, and they took the failure of such reductive analyses to indicate a more general failure of legal positivism. Hans Kelsen originally sought to defend legal positivism, but ultimately concluded that positivism could sustain the normative character of law, though only by treating legal discourse as grounded in a basic assumption of law's bindingness, what he called the Grundnorm. HLA Hart rejected Kelsen's theory of the Grundnorm, but agreed that while reductivism was certainly to be rejected for its failure to capture the normative character of law, the rejection of reductivism should not lead to a rejection of legal positivism, since the prescriptive action-guiding character of propositions of law can still be preserved without grounding law in morality. However, the author argues that Hart's theory, though not to be underestimated in power and subtlety, should nevertheless be ultimately rejected for being a mere tautology, since by effectively defining legal validity in terms of derivability from the rule of recognition, it, of course, follows that the concept cannot be applied to the Rule itself.

This book commences with the biblical parable of the good Samaritan. This parable raises two private law issues: firstly, whether those who are in the position of the priest and the Levite have a legal duty to aid the wounded man and, secondly, whether those who do intervene have in law a claim against the beneficiary of their intervention. Both issues are addressed separately. Part I is concerned with the former issue. In Part II, the second issue is addressed. Again, it emerges that the approach taken by the English courts is fundamentally different from the position in civilian jurisdictions. Where English law in principle denies the good Samaritan a claim, French and German law contain a general rule that does grant the intervener a right to be reimbursed for expenses incurred and to be compensated for loss suffered.

This chapter analyses the law of tort that relates to damage and addresses the question of whether the damage is actionable if it is caused by someone’s negligence. It explains how the law of tort is not to be understood only by the creation of a legal duty rather is dependent upon damage. It also notes the recovery in tort if someone has suffered damage, which is in contra-distinction to the law of contract. This chapter looks at damage and its categorization, focusing on the tort of negligence in relation to defective structures that has two separate species. It describes the first species that permits recovery for direct costs or losses that suffered as a result of a negligent act or omission, while the second species relates to all losses.

Much of the media presents nurses as the faceless crew of a healthcare ship captained by charismatic physicians. But nursing is an autonomous profession. Nurses train and manage themselves. They have independent legal duties to patients and a unique scope of practice, including special expertise in such areas as pain management. Hundreds of thousands have graduate degrees in nursing. Occasionally media products have given some sense of nursing autonomy, including a few news media items and fictional portrayals, such as Call the Midwife. But the most influential entertainment media presents nurses as physician handmaidens. Major Hollywood hospital shows have done so regularly, including Grey’s Anatomy, House, and The Mindy Project. The paradigmatic nurse-physician interaction is a physician “order” followed by a meek nurse’s “Yes, doctor!” Although recent US nurse-focused shows have shown nurses pushing back against poor physician care, each has at times wrongly suggested that nurses report to physicians.