Legal History Commons^™

The Class Of Injuries Test: A Unifying Proposal To Determining Duty, Proximate Cause, And Superseding Cause In Negligence Claims, Judge Leonard J. Feldman, Julia Doherty

Seattle University Law Review

While there seems to be universal agreement that liability in tort cannot be unlimited, there is widespread disagreement regarding the various tests that courts utilize to limit such liability. We assume here that breach can be proven: the defendant failed to conduct themself in accordance with the salient standard of conduct (for example, failure to exercise reasonable care under all the circumstances). In the ensuing litigation, the court and jury are asked to decide several issues that each limit liability for negligence. Here, we focus on three oft-debated issues: duty, proximate cause, and superseding cause. The tests for each are …

Grotheer V. Escape Adventures, Inc., Paisley Piasecki

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Death Be Not Strange. The Montreal Convention’S Mislabeling Of Human Remains As Cargo And Its Near Unbreakable Liability Limits, Christopher Ogolla

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article discusses Article 22 of the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air (“The Montreal Convention”) and its impact on the transportation of human remains. The Convention limits carrier liability to a sum of 19 Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) per kilogram in the case of destruction, loss, damage or delay of part of the cargo or of any object contained therein. Transportation of human remains falls under Article 22 which forecloses any recovery for pain and suffering unaccompanied by physical injury. This Article finds fault with this liability limit. The Article notes that if …

Palsgraf V. Long Island R.R.: Its Historical Context, William E. Nelson

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

European Legal Development: The Case Of Tort: Comparative Studies In The Development Of The Law Of Tort In Europe, Vol 9, Anthony Sebok

Faculty Articles

This review addresses volumes 7-9 of the series Comparative Studies in the Development of the Law of Torts in Europe, edited by John Bell and David Ibbetson and published by Cambridge University Press.

Contract Law And The Hand Formula, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Jurisprudence Of Action And Inaction In The Law Of Tort: Solving The Puzzle Of Nonfeasance And Misfeasance From The Fifteenth Through The Twentieth Centuries, Theodore Silver, Jean Elting Rowe

Theodore Silver

No abstract provided.

A Watershed Moment: Reversals Of Tort Theory In The Nineteenth Century, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a new assessment of the stages in the development of fault and strict liability and their justifications in American history. Building from the evidence that a wide majority of state courts adopted Fletcher v. Rylands and strict liability for unnatural or hazardous activities in the late nineteenth century, a watershed moment turns to the surprising reversals in tort ideology in the wake of flooding disasters.

An established view of American tort law is that the fault rule supposedly prevailed over strict liability in the nineteenth century, with some arguing that it was based on instrumental arguments to …

Prudence, Benevolence, And Negligence: Virtue Ethics And Tort Law, Heidi Li Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Tort law assesses negligence according to the conduct of a reasonable person of ordinary prudence who acts with due care for the safety of others. This standard assigns three traits to the person whose conduct sets the bar for measuring negligence: reasonableness, ordinary prudence, and due care for the safety of others. Yet contemporary tort scholars have almost exclusively examined only one of these attributes, reasonableness, and have wholly neglected to carefully examine the other elements key to the negligence standard: prudence and due care for the safety of others. It is mistaken to reduce negligence to reasonableness or to …

The Jurisprudence Of Action And Inaction In The Law Of Tort: Solving The Puzzle Of Nonfeasance And Misfeasance From The Fifteenth Through The Twentieth Centuries, Theodore Silver, Jean Elting Rowe

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Women, Mothers, And The Law Of Fright: A History, Martha Chamallas, Linda K. Kerber

Michigan Law Review

This article presents a gendered history of the law's treatment of fright-based physical injuries. Our goal is to connect the law of fright to the changing cultural and intellectual forces of the twentieth century. Through a feminist lens, we reexamine the accounts of the legal treatment of fright-based injuries offered by Victorian-erajurists, traditionalist legal scholars of the first two decades of the twentieth century, a legal realist in the 1930s, and a Freudian medical-legal commentator from the 1940s, all of whom helped to shape present-day tort doctrine. We conclude with an account of Dillon v. Legg, in which the …

Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A century ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., examined the history of negligence in search of a general theory of tort. He concluded that from the earliest times in England, the basis of tort liability was fault, or the failure to exercise due care. Liability for an injury to another arose whenever the defendant failed "to use such care as a prudent man would use under the circumstances.” A decade ago Morton J. Horwitz reexamined the history of negligence for the same purpose and concluded that negligence was not originally understood as carelessness or fault. Rather, negligence meant "neglect or failure …

The Perils Of Writing An Intellectual History Of Torts, George C. Christie

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History by G. Edward White

Accident, Mistake, And Rules Of Liability In The Fourteenth-Century Law Of Torts, Morris S. Arnold

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Liability Without Fault And Proximate Cause, Fowler V. Harper

Michigan Law Review

As a logical matter there seem to be two possible schemes of legal liability. The first one may be stated as follows: One may be liable for all consequences of all of his acts. While it has been suggested that this was the principle of the mediaeval law, it has been pointed out by Professor Winfield that such was never literally the case. Under this principle, as he has shown, everyone would be in jail except for these reasons: no one could legally put anyone else in jail, no one could legally keep anyone else in jail, and no one …

The Early Liability Of A Bailee, Norman F. Arterburn

Michigan Law Review

All discussion of the origin of the absolute liability of a common carrier of goods naturally harks back to the earliest conception of a bailment and its related remedies. We have had two diametrically opposed views urged as to the first liability of the ordinary bailee. Justice Holmes and numerous other authorities take the view that the liability in the' first instance was absolute in the case of all bailees. Professor Beale is the exponent of the opposing view, that such liability was qualified to such an extent that it amounted in fact, only to negligence liability. An interpretation of …