Law Commons^™

Claims Against States, Leslie L. Anderson

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1924, commencing a leading series of articles on "Government Liability in Tort," Professor Edward M. Borchard referred to what he called the "unexampled expansion of the police power in the United States." He wrote of the increasing risks which individuals in this country are left to bear from "defective, negligent, perverse or erroneous administration" of the functions of government. If those functions had increased at a considerable rate at the time of his article, what would one say of their extent today? Even the leaders of the New Deal discerned the risks to which increased governmental activity subjected people, …