Moral Progress in Legal Doctrine

Authors

• Philip Petrov, Texas A&M University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2026

Journal Title

Journal of Tort Law

ISSN

1932-9148

DOI

10.1515/jtl-2025-0011

Abstract

This article integrates the concept of moral progress – here, moral improvement in the thinking and behavior of individuals over time – into the study of legal doctrine. The article first presents a naturalistic account of what moral progress is and describes three of its most historically and analytically important forms: (1) moral circle expansion, (2) moral domain expansion, and (3) increasing sensitivity to proportionality. The article then analyzes three historical developments in U.S. tort law that qualify as instances of moral progress: (1) the partial demise of the “suicide rule” beginning around the 1980s (according to the article, an episode of moral circle expansion), (2) the liberalization of recovery for emotional harm in the negligent infliction tort beginning around the 1970s (moral domain expansion), and (3) the near-total replacement of contributory negligence by comparative negligence throughout the twentieth century (increasing sensitivity to proportionality). The article ends by outlining three legal scholarly implications of the analysis. (1) Legal scholars may be able to use the concept of moral progress as a criterion for making internal as opposed to external criticisms of tort law. (2) Attending to historical moral progress in an area of law facilitates sounder assessment of the area’s present-day moral value. (3) Studying moral progress in legal doctrine can identify open legal historical questions about historical legal actors’ motives. More generally, this article can inform legal scholars who seek to analyze morally progressive or regressive change in any area of law.

First Page

43

Last Page

77

Num Pages

35

Volume Number

19

Issue Number

1

Publisher

De Gruyter Brill

Rights

Open Access. © 2025 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Philip Petrov, Moral Progress in Legal Doctrine, 19 J. Tort L. 43 (2026).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/2388

File Type

PDF