| As a species of private law governed by common law principles shaped by judicial pronouncements, negligence law contemplates an innate measure of judicial creativity and legal development that defies the descriptor of "activism" as it has been employed in public law discourse. This paradox of "judicial activism" in negligence law notwithstanding, recent pronouncements---notably from the Supreme Court of Canada in cases of vicarious liability and recovery of pure economic loss---suggest that the judicial ability to fashion outcomes is, or ought to be, circumscribed. One prominent commentator has suggested that the Court has gone "too far" in privileging "policy" considerations at the expense of "legal principle." This criticism goes to the nature of the judicial role, and to negligence law's capacity to serve as a normative guide to that role.; Assessing such criticism requires engaging the paradox of judicial activism in negligence law, which in turn requires justifying a conception of judicial activism that accounts for the way in which courts apply and develop legal rules and which isolates that judicial method from policy considerations. Because, however, policy considerations have become prevalent in positively expressed negligence law, the problem arises at a pragmatic level of how to do justice without acting upon an ingrained activist impulse. Resolution is achieved in an understanding of the liability inquiry as conforming to the law's linguistic scheme of rights and corresponding duties, based upon retrospective assumed values whose origins are deeply rooted in the law, not prospective conceptions of the common wealth.; The distinction between legal language and policy is amplified and given positive account by considering objections---(1) Non-legal language cannot account for law; (2) Legal language cannot account for policy; and (3) Non-legal language is necessary to achieve law reform. These objections can be answered with reference to three areas of the law of negligence---vicarious liability, relational economic loss and loss of bargain---in which activist rationales have displaced non-activist justifications for the governing rules. In the result, not only are the conceptual and pragmatic weaknesses of activist jurisprudence illuminated, but the potential for non-activist reform is unseen. |
