The Diversity Theory of the Alien Tort Statute

The glaring gap in tort theory is its failure to take adequate account of liability insurance. Much of tort theory fails to recognize the active and...

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

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

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...

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...

In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the Supreme Court began adopting First Amendment restrictions on liability for defamation and other speech torts...

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

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...

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

The requirement of harm has significantly impeded the enforcement of privacy law. In most tort and contract cases, plaintiffs must establish that they...

This Article, written for the annual Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy, chronicles a series of developments in American history that...

Shifts in academic paradigms are rare. Still, it was not long ago that the values taken to govern the private law were thought to be distinct from the...

For over a decade, a battle has been raging in the trial courts of this country over something called the "reptile theory," often simply referred to...

Tort Law and the Construction of Change studies the interaction of law and social change in American history. Tort law—civil law made by judges, not...

The standard story of the development of modern tort liability is straightforward, but it turns out to be seriously misleading. The story is that, in...

Through the standing doctrine, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken a new step toward severely limiting the effective enforcement of privacy laws. The...

Today all tort lawyers, scholars, and teachers understand that there are three bases of liability in tort: intent, negligence, and strict liability...

The future of tort theory cannot be sensibly imagined without understanding its past. Our aim is to understand where tort theory has been in order to...