Law Commons^™

Why Torts Die, Kyle Graham

Faculty Publications

A few authors have performed autopsies on specific torts and identified the suspected reasons behind their deaths. These analyses, though interesting, are by their own admission of limited scope and do not provide especially useful analytic or predictive tools. This Article has a broader goal. Just as pathologists and epidemiologists study how fatal illnesses spread, conservation biologists examine why animal species go extinct, and geographers and anthropologists try to understand why societies succeed or fail, this Article surveys the roster of dead and dying torts and then asks (and tries to answer) a novel question: Why do torts die? This …

Continuing Violations Doctrine, Kyle Graham

Faculty Publications

It has been intimated that the uncertainty surrounding the continuing violations doctrine owes to a failure to grasp its origins and modem-day contours. This article treats this assertion as true, and tries to dispel at least some of this confusion. Toward this purpose, this article charts the conceptual landscape of this theory and explains how and why the doctrine has been and should be applied.

This analysis begins with the recognition of and distinction between two types of continuing violations. Though frequently confused or conflated, these two approaches are in fact quite different in both purpose and effect. The first …

Anti-Federalist Procedure, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

"[T]he new federal government will ... be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments."

"[T]he Constitution of the United States ... recognizes and preserves the autonomy and independence of the States-independence in their legislative and independence in their judicial departments. . . . Any interference with either, except as [constitutionally] permitted, is an invasion of the authority of the State and, to that extent, a denial of its independence."

The understanding expressed by these opening quotes-that the national government was designed to be one of limited powers that would refrain from encroaching …

Judging Plaintiffs, Jason M. Solomon

Faculty Publications

With its powerful account of the normative principles embodied in the structure and practice of the law of torts, corrective justice is considered the leading moral theory of tort law. It has a significant advantage over instrumental and other moral theories in that it is more consistent with what judges say when they analyze tort law concepts. And with criticism of instrumental accounts, like law and economics, on a number of fronts, it is the leading descriptive theory of tort law. In this Article, I take up a question that has never been answered adequately by corrective-justice or other moral …