This timely, lucid, and compelling book offers fresh and insightful treatments of important topics in tort law and law more generally, demonstrating at a granular level the phenomenon of law as a semi-autonomous institution." - John C.P. Goldberg, Harvard Law School, coauthor of <em>Recognizing Wrongs</em><br /><br />"Abraham and White present as powerful an argument as possible for a distinctively lawyers’ logic in the management of social change. This book makes readers stop and think anew about the role of law in a changing world and will appeal to anyone interested in figuring out a path out of our present predicaments. An important intervention in the field." - John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, author of <em>The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law</em>
In five fascinating chapters, they cover understudied areas of tort law, such as liability for nonphysical harm—including lawsuits for defamation, privacy, emotional distress, sexual harassment, and the hacking of confidential information—and aspects of tort litigation that have now disappeared, such as the prohibition against "interested" parties testifying in civil actions or the intentional infliction of temporal damage without justification. What emerges is a picture of the complicated legal dance American judges performed to cloak their decisions to make at times radical changes in tort law in response to social transformations. When confronting established tort doctrines under pressure from emerging social changes, they found ways to preserve at least the appearance of doctrinal continuity.
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. The Epistemology of the Civil Trial and the Rise of Modern Tort Liability
- 2. Conceptualizing Tort Law—the Continuous (and Continuing) Struggle
- 3. The Problem of the Dignitary Torts
- 4. The First Amendment and the Constitutionalization of Tort Liability
- 5. Torts without Names, New Torts, and the Future of Liability for Intangible Harm
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index