Delicious Irony

I've been meaning to post this comment for a while, but exams come around, and other things become more important.

In tort law, there's a concept called respondeat superior. It literally means "let the master answer," and it's a doctrine that, stripped of all its nuance, holds employers liable when their employees negligently injure somebody on the job. So when you get run over by a UPS truck, you can recover from UPS instead of Bob, the UPS driver who actually ran you down.

Respondeat superior seems like a very progressive doctrine for 2 reasons. First, it increases the chances that the victim of negligence will be able to recover (employers are more likely to have pockets deep enough to pay the award). And second, employers who enjoy the benefits of risky behavior (after all, if Bob drives 95 mph instead of 55 mph he can deliver more packages for UPS each day) must internalize the costs of that behavior. (You might argue that respondeat superior isn't so wonderful when you consider that, as a result of the doctrine, employers pay workers less and hire fewer of them. A fair point that raises an empirical question.)

The delicious irony is the historical development of respondeat superior. It first arose in Roman law because slaves were not considered people. As a result, if a slave injured you, you couldn't sue the slave in a Roman court because only legal persons can be parties to a suit. So Roman law let you sue the slave's master. A legal doctrine that began as a paradigm of inequity has evolved into a wonderfully progressive doctrine!