Torts Commons^™

Torts And Personhood, Melissa Mortazavi

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Civil Liability For Sexual Misconduct, Mike K. Steenson

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Most Substantial Factor: Analysis Of Ambiguous Causation--Staub As Trustee Of Weeks V. Myrtle Lake Resort, Llc, 964 N.W.2d 614 (Minn. 2021), Hailey Oestreicher

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Defaming The President, Douglas B. Mckechnie

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Climate Change And Modern State Common Law Nuisance And Trespass Tort Claims, Jack Wold-Mcgimsey

University of Colorado Law Review

This Comment examines the use of state common law tort claims to address climate change. The aim of this work is not to provide an in-depth examination of these issues, but rather to provide a contextualized and comprehensive overview of some of the most important issues in this field using modern cases actively being litigated. This Comment comes to the conclusion that the future of common law nuisance and trespass claims in the context of climate change is, for now, unclear. Given the national and global implications of climate change, courts may find that isolated states cannot set binding precedents …

Sieracki Lives: A Portrait Of The Interplay Between Legislation And The Judicially Created General Maritime Law, Thomas C. Galligan Jr.

Journal Articles

In American maritime law, the interplay between the courts and Congress is complex and iterative. A significant body of American admiralty law, the general maritime law, has been judicially created and developed. But Congress has also enacted a number of important statutes governing maritime commerce and the rights of maritime workers, such as the Longshore and Harbor Worker’s Compensation Act (“LHWCA”). The back and forth between the courts and Congress in interpreting those statutes and gauging their impact on and consistency with the general maritime law is ongoing. One important area where the courts development of the general maritime law …

Bittersweet: A Potential Avenue To International Tort Liability For American Companies In The Cocoa Supply Chain, Sara Leonhartsberger

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Thaler V. Vidal: Artificial Intelligence—Can The Invented Become The Inventor?, Michelle Lavrichenko

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unsticking American Tort Theory, Benjamin Sundholm

University of Cincinnati Law Review

In the United States, the debate over the foundations of tort law is at an impasse. On one side of the dispute, economic theorists contend that tort law is primarily concerned with the forward-looking aim of maximizing societal wealth. The most prominent critics of this view claim that an economic analysis of tort law cannot explain the field’s backward-looking concern with achieving corrective justice by remedying wrongs. Despite the strength of this critique, economic theorists have a legitimate response available to them: corrective justice describes the reparative aspect of tort law, but it stops short of providing a justificatory account …

Perspectives On The Future Of Tort Damages: The Law Should Reflect Reality, Victor E. Schwartz, Christopher E. Appel

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Just Strict Liability, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Cardozo Law Review

Theorists who contend that tort is designed to do justice cannot explain strict liability. The strict sector plagues these scholars because it extracts payment from defendants who have acted reasonably and are therefore considered innocent. If tort is about wronging and recourse, then strict liability makes no sense. Stymied, justice theorists have ceded the sector to economically minded counterparts who are concerned primarily with efficient market outcomes. As this theory has taken hold, some have declared strict liability “dead.” This Article offers a justice theory of the interpersonal wrong that permits liability in the absence of traditional fault—namely, the delegation …

Construction Law: The English Route To Modern Construction Law, Vivian Ramsey

Arkansas Law Review

In this Article, I will look at the way that construction law has developed in the English common law world from its roots in the law of England and Wales. Whilst common law traditions are now applied to many jurisdictions, the number of jurisdictions in which English precedents are binding is now small. But, in many common law jurisdictions decisions of the English courts are still treated as “persuasive.” English decisions in the field of construction law have an extensive reach in terms of their persuasiveness. First, having a long-established court system, including a specialist court for 150 years, has …

Redefining Risk: Judicially Heightened Risk Standards And Hiv-Specific Criminal Laws, Bryan Olert

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Simple Model Of Torts And Moral Wrongs, Steven Schaus

Notre Dame Law Review

According to the “standard model” of torts and moral wrongs—the model implicit in leading moral theories of tort law—tort law imposes genuine duties that are distinct from, and only roughly coincide with, our preexisting moral duties. A “tort,” on this model, is a distinctive kind of wrong, the breach of a tort-generated duty. In this Article, I suggest that moral theories of tort law start with a simpler story—one that dispenses with a distinct domain of tort-generated duties. According to what I call the “simple model” of torts and moral wrongs, tort law aims to recognize and respond directly to …

The Deep Architecture Of American Covid-19 Tort Reform 2020-21, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

The rapid emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic produced massive state actions to protect in public health through the exercise of the police powers by local, state and national governments. In the United States there were calls early in the crisis to exercise the state’s power over tort law: As early as April 2020, the American Tort Reform Association published a White Paper, Responding to the Coming Lawsuit Surge that called for “reasonable constraints on . . . lawsuits that pose an obstacle to the coronavirus response effort, place businesses in jeopardy, and further damage the economy.”

This article, prepared for …

Reparations For A Public Nuisance? The Effort To Compensate Survivors, Victims, And Descendants Of The Tulsa Race Massacre One Hundred Years Later, Adam Coretz

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Patient Decision Aids Improve Patient Safety And Reduce Medical Liability Risk, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Maine Law Review

Tort-based doctrines of informed consent have utterly failed to assure that patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to the healthcare they receive. Fifty years of experience with the doctrine of informed consent have shown it to be an abject catastrophe. Most patients lack an even minimal understanding of their treatment options. But there is hope. Substantial evidence shows that patient decision aids (PDAs) and shared decision making can bridge the gap between the theory and practice of informed consent. These evidence-based educational tools empower patients to make decisions with significantly more knowledge and less decisional conflict than clinician-patient discussions …

Misreading Menetti: The Case Does Not Help You Avoid Liability For Your Own Fraud, Val D. Ricks

St. Mary's Law Journal

Several decades ago, an incorrect legal idea surfaced in Texas jurisprudence: that business entity actors are immune from liability for fraud that they themselves commit, as if the entity is solely responsible. Though the Supreme Court of Texas has rejected that result several times, it keeps coming back. The most recent manifestation is as a construction of Texas’s unique veil-piercing statute. Many lawyers have suggested that this view of the veil-piercing statute originated in Menetti v. Chavers, a San Antonio Court of Appeals case decided in 1998. Menetti has in fact played a prominent role in the movement to …

Emotional Distress Recovery For Mishandling Of Human Remains: A Fifty State Survey, Christopher Ogolla

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Third Restatement, Duty, And Foreseeability, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

The Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm (the “Third Restatement”) was adopted by the American Law Institute in 2010. The approach taken by the Third Restatement to negligence law excludes foreseeability from the duty determination and places it squarely as a relevant factor in the breach issue; it adopts the “but-for” standard for causation; and rejects proximate cause terminology, instead utilizing a scope of liability approach in which the key question is whether the harms that occurred were of the same general type that made the actor’s conduct tortious. Removal of foreseeability from the duty determination …

Legislating Data Loyalty, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.

In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our …

The Criminal Legal System Doesn’T Care About Your Mental Illness, Fredrick E. Vars

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Why would a beloved small-town doctor with no history of violence suddenly strangle his father to death? The Other Dr. Gilmer is a gripping account of the search for an answer to this question. It turns out the doctor has a rare neurological disorder that likely caused the killing. If only the diagnosis had come before trial, the author believes, the doctor would not have been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. That belief is appealing, but naïve. Jails and prisons are full of people with mental illness. Misdiagnosis is not the reason. A close examination …

The Surprising Virtues Of Data Loyalty, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe are seriously considering imposing duties of data loyalty that implement ideas from privacy law scholarship, but critics claim such duties are unnecessary, unworkable, overly individualistic, and indeterminately vague. This paper takes those criticisms seriously, and its analysis of them reveals that duties of data loyalty have surprising virtues. Loyalty, it turns out, can support collective well-being by embracing privacy’s relational turn; it can be a powerful state of mind for reenergizing privacy reform; it prioritizes human values rather than potentially empty formalism; and it offers solutions that are flexible and clear rather than …

Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams

Scholarly Works

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup.

Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure …

Anti-Subordination Torts, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Grave: A Fiduciary’S Access To A Decedent’S Digital Assets, Isabelle N. Sehati

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tort Law: Cases & Critique, Thomas E. Kadri

Books

My goal in creating this casebook is to do my part to make legal education more affordable, accessible, and adaptable. That’s why I’m making the book available to all for free. By using a CC BY-NC license, I’m also inviting others to adapt these materials for their own use, so long as they adhere to the non-commerciality and attribution terms. (Anyone interested in “remixing” this book for their own purposes should feel free to contact me, including if you’d like a more adaptable non-PDF version.)

You’re welcome to print any part of this casebook if you want a hard …

Tort Remedies In Military Prisons And Brigs, Brenner M. Fissell, Max Jesse Goldberg

Faculty Publications

Symposium on Military Justice October 2021.

Hosted by National Institute of Military Justice (In honor of NIMJ's 30th Anniversary)

The Ratio Method: Addressing Complex Tort Liability In The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Harrison C. Margolin, Grant H. Frazier

St. Mary's Law Journal

Emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution show fundamental promise for improving productivity and quality of life, though their misuse may also cause significant social disruption. For example, while artificial intelligence will be used to accelerate society’s processes, it may also displace millions of workers and arm cybercriminals with increasingly powerful hacking capabilities. Similarly, human gene editing shows promise for curing numerous diseases, but also raises significant concerns about adverse health consequences related to the corruption of human and pathogenic genomes.

In most instances, only specialists understand the growing intricacies of these novel technologies. As the complexity and speed of …

Absolute Publishing Power And Bulletproof Immunity: How Section 230 Shields Internet Service Providers From Liability And Makes It Impossible To Protect Your Reputation Online, Victoria Anderson

Seattle University Law Review Online

No abstract provided.