John C.P. Goldberg & Benjamin Zipursky, The Restatement (Third) and the Place of Duty in Negligence Law, 54 Vand. L. Rev. 657 (2001).
Abstract: In the Moral of MacPherson, it was argued that the concept of duty does not does important work in judicial decisions about tort, and in the academic enterprise of explaining and interpreting tort law. Indeed, it is suggested that, without the concept of duty, a cogent general description of the structure of negligence law would not be possible. This article intends to do what was argued could not be done: to re-describe the law of negligence in terms of unreasonableness, causation, and injury, with duty serving merely as a question-begging label for the absence of a policy-based exemption. The central critical goal of this article is to demonstrate that the self-conscious and carefully-constructed three-element views put forward in the drafts of the Restatement do not capture the law, and hence that a sound restatement of negligence cannot simply neglect duty.