The Legal Concept of Care

Abstract The notion of ‘care’ is invoked within legal doctrine in the law of tort, medical law, and family law. Yet despite its centrality across these doctrinal domains, these invocations have rarely been studied together. This neglect seems to stem from an underlying assumption that ‘care’ refers to fundamentally different things in each context – rendering consolidated analysis unhelpful. This paper challenges that assumption. I argue that, contrary to the standard assumption, these areas of law all invoke distinct tokens of the same conceptual type. To establish this, I begin with an analysis of the ordinary concept of care that draws on literature in care theory, showing that the concept of care tracks three analytically distinct categories: action, attitude, and disposition. I then argue that each doctrinal domain structures legal duties around different facets of this same concept: tort law focuses on dispositions and actions, medical law on actions, and family law on actions, attitudes, and their combinations. A distinctly legal concept of care thus emerges – one that not only invokes the ordinary concept but also actively shapes it.