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Full-Text Articles in Torts
Mainstreaming Privacy Torts, Danielle K. Citron
Mainstreaming Privacy Torts, Danielle K. Citron
Faculty Scholarship
In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis proposed a privacy tort and seventy years later, William Prosser conceived it as four wrongs. In both eras, privacy invasions primarily caused psychic and reputational wounds of a particular sort. Courts insisted upon significant proof due to those injuries’ alleged ethereal nature. Digital networks alter this calculus by exacerbating the injuries inflicted. Because humiliating personal information posted online has no expiration date, neither does individual suffering. Leaking databases of personal information and postings that encourage assaults invade privacy in ways that exact significant financial and physical harm. This dispels concerns that plaintiffs might …
A Missing Markets Theory Of Tort Law, Keith N. Hylton
A Missing Markets Theory Of Tort Law, Keith N. Hylton
Faculty Scholarship
This Article provides a framework for reconciling the tension between tort doctrine and economic theory, and for addressing the general failure of economically oriented theories to come to grips with doctrine at a detailed level. My claim is that tort doctrine should be viewed as a response to the incompleteness of markets, or more generally the problem of missing markets. Because of market incompleteness, some of the benefits as well as costs associated with activities will be shifted or "externalized" to third parties. Tort doctrine reflects sensitivity to the externalization of benefits and costs. It can therefore be understood only …