Sandy Steel

Sandy Steel is Professor of Law and Philosophy of Law, University of Oxford. He works on the conceptual and moral foundations of private law, especially torts and remedies, with recent work on positive tort duties to prevent harm, causation, compensation for permissible harm-causing, immunities, the moral relevance of deterrence to rights-based theories of private law, and why remedies are normatively like self-defence.

His work has been frequently cited by the UK Supreme Court and referred to by the Supreme Court of Canada, the Supreme Court of India, the High Court of Australia, the New Zealand Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Ireland. He has held visiting positions at NYU, the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, Tel Aviv University, and Singapore Management University.

He is currently the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship awarded to research his current book project on public officials and authorities in private law.

His first book Proof of Causation in Tort Law (CUP, 2015), a normative and comparative study of English, US, French, German, Australian and Canadian law was described by the co-reporter for the Restatement (Third) of Torts as “a relentlessly analytical and rigorous book” and “fruitful for generations of scholars to come”: (2018) 9 Journal of European Tort Law 308. In 2016, he was awarded the Modern Law Review’s Wedderburn Prize.

His other books include Omissions in Tort Law (OUP 2024), Great Debates in Jurisprudence (with Nick McBride, (2nd edn, 2018) forthcoming in a Chinese translation); The Structure of Tort Law (OUP, 2021, a translation of N Jansen, Die Struktur des Haftungsrechts), and Private Law and Practical Reason (edited with H. Psarras, OUP 2020). Recently he was appointed an advisor to the American Law Institute’s project on the Principles of Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence.