Why are the wrongs wrong? Scots lawyers’ approaches to justifying liability in delict

This article explores the development of Scot’s lawyers’ approaches to justifying delictual liability. It suggests that these reflect the taxonomical relationship between delict and the rest of the law. Four models are posited and discussed: the residual model (delict is the category for wrongful conduct without another taxonomical home); the crime/delict model (criminal law determines what is wrongful and delict handles its private law consequences); the conduct-harm model (wrongfulness is rooted in conduct which foreseeably or intentionally causes harm) and the rights-based model (wrongfulness is grounded on the breach of a right justified elsewhere in private law).