The Bhopal gas tragedy essentially marked the beginning of mass tort jurisprudence in India. When the US courts dismissed the consolidated lawsuit resulting out of the Bhopal disaster and returned it to India for judicial determination, the Indian legal system was confronted with one of the biggest challenges it had ever faced. The difficulty arising out of the unprecedented extent and intensity of the event was compounded by a lack of prior experience of the Indian legal system in dealing with mass tort cases. Bhopal brought out the inadequacy of the then-prevalent traditional common law of tort in dealing with the legal challenges posed by the case, thus, underscoring the need for modifying the existing tort law doctrine. The most significant modification introduced to the Indian tort law in the wake of Bhopal was the dissolution of public-private law divide through the invocation of the doctrine of parens patriae and the enunciation of the principle of absolute liability. The primary thesis of this paper is that the rationale and need underlying this dissolution of public-private law divide can be well understood in the light of critical social scientific studies on risk. As the concept of risk is inextricably linked with anthropogenic mass disasters, the critical epistemologies of risk provide strong empirical and normative foundations for the development of a distinct mass tort jurisprudence, much needed in today’s post-modern ‘risk society’.

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大规模侵权法学和风险的批判认识论：印度大规模侵权法中公私鸿沟的消解

博帕尔毒气悲剧本质上标志着印度大规模侵权法理学的开始。当美国法院驳回因博帕尔灾难引发的合并诉讼并将其退回印度进行司法裁决时，印​​度法律体系面临着有史以来最大的挑战之一。由于缺乏印度法律系统在处理大规模侵权案件方面的先前经验，该事件前所未有的范围和强度所带来的困难更加复杂。博帕尔指出了当时盛行的传统普通侵权法在应对案件带来的法律挑战方面的不足，从而强调了修改现有侵权法学说的必要性。在博帕尔事件之后对印度侵权法进行的最重要的修改是通过援引父母的教义和绝对责任原则的阐述消除了公私法的分歧。本文的主要论点是，根据对风险的批判性社会科学研究，可以很好地理解这种消除公私法分歧的基本原理和需求。由于风险的概念与人为大规模灾害密不可分，风险的关键认识论为发展独特的大规模侵权法学提供了强有力的经验和规范基础，这是当今后现代“风险社会”所急需的。