Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History

Three established torts require the defendant’s behavior to be “offensive” or “highly offensive” in order to be actionable: offensive battery, public...

An upcoming Supreme Court case on Article III standing and disability presents critical questions about the future of litigation that promotes...

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...

It has long been said that the common law "works itself pure" But in the law of torts, not always. This Article reveals and analyzes the...

At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...

This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...

offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...

The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...

Sandy Levinson has always taken secession arguments seriously. This is, in my eyes, one of his great virtues. There are very few scholars who would be...

Public nuisance has lived many lives. A centuries-old doctrine defined as an unreasonable interference with a right common to the public, it is...

It was 1804, and Thomas Ruffin, future Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, was having doubts about slavery. Ruffin was a young student...

IN DECEMBER, 1999, after William E. Jackson's death, members of his family found, in a closet of his Manhattan apartment, a folder labeled “Roosevelt...

This Essay was prepared for a Symposium at the Yale Law School, celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of The Nature of the Judicial Process, the...

This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...

Vanessa Bryant’s recent verdict against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Fire Departments represents a federal jury’s response to immoral and...

Analysis based on Hohfeld’s analytical system shows that liability rules, as defined by Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed, are a false category...

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld is well-known for maintaining that various terms in law – “rights,” most prominently – confusingly designate a number of quite...

Co authoring saved me. Literally.  But for the fact that my senior colleagues at UCLA did not care whether I ever wrote anything sole authored, I don...