Form and Substance in the “Private Law” of Torts

Instrumentalist ideas have long been prominent in torts scholarship. Since the rise of legal realism, discussions of deterrence, compensation, the minimization of accident costs, and the distribution of losses have dominated scholarly discourse. In the past several decades, however, wholesale rejections of instrumentalist tort theory have arisen. The most uncompromising of these views rallies around the avowedly formalist battle cry that tort is “private law”. Ernest Weinrib’s elegant and influential book, The Idea of Private Law, declares its allegiance to that thesis in its title, and the idea figures almost as centrally in Arthur Ripstein’s recent and important Private Wrongs. Theorists who rally around the banner of “private law” claim that tort law’s governing principles of right and responsibility tumble out of the field’s characteristic legal form. Law, as they understand it, is constitutive of just relations among persons, not an instrument for the pursuit of independently valuable ends. For scholars like Weinrib and Ripstein, “private law” is the Kantian idea of reason that makes our actual law of torts intelligible. The claim that torts is a law of wrongs where persons bring claims in their own names for harms that they have wrongly suffered against those allegedly responsible for those wrongful harms is powerful and persuasive. The claim that the obligations persons owe one another in tort are obligations owed among equal and independent persons is likewise compelling. But theorists of tort as “private law” overshoot the mark by both asking and making too much of form. They ask too much of form when they attempt to make sense of the private law of torts solely in terms of form—eschewing all talk of interests. We cannot understand or justify the law of torts without attending to the interests that it protects. In tort, as elsewhere, rights and the duties they ground protect important individual interests. For example, it is our interest in the physical integrity of our persons that grounds the law of negligence. Theorist of tort as “private law” make too much of form when they present the legal category as its own private fiefdom walled off from surrounding legal fields. For Ripstein and Weinrib, “private law” is its own autonomous domain, sealed off against infection by any legal field whose form identifies it as “public law”. In our law, the private law of torts cooperates and competes with public law institutions as a response to the pervasiveness of accidental harm in an industrial and technological society. It is one way of institutionalizing our interest in safety. Establishing rightful relations among free and equal persons in civil society requires that institutions protect persons’ urgent interests, not just establish their formal independence. The theoretical understanding that we need will recognize that we misunderstand even the private law of torts itself if we sever it entirely from forms of collective responsibility for avoiding and repairing accidental harm with which it competes and cooperates.

Reconstructing Malice in the Law of Punitive Damages

Punitive damages present two related puzzles. One concerns their object. If they are punitive, their object is to punish tortfeasors. If they are damages, their object is to compensate tort victims. If they are both, the problem is to reconcile these different objects in applying them. A second puzzle involves their subject. Punitive damages are awarded for egregious wrongdoing. But the nature of that egregiousness is nebulous and contested, implicating many poorly understood terms. The two puzzles are connected, because the subject of punitive damages will inform their object. Once we know the type of wrongfulness that punitive damages deal with, we can understand better whether and how they are punishing, compensating, or both. This Article reconstructs one of punitive damages’ central subjects: malice. In so doing, it clarifies one key object of punitive damages: to offer redress to a victim of cruelty. Malice is a ubiquitous textual element in the state law of punitive damages. But there has been little scholarly commentary about what malice means for punitive damages. Drawing from the common history of tort and criminal law, this Article identifies two core meanings of malice: a desire or motive to do wrong, and a disposition of callous indifference to the wrong inflicted. Though distinct, these meanings broadly coalesce in the concept of cruelty. The Article argues that this reconstructed account of the wrong of malice represents a powerful justification for awarding punitive damages. Malice as cruelty as a justification for punitive damages also fits within a broader view of tort law as redress for specific private wrongs. But malice as a subject of punitive damages clarifies and enriches this account of their object. A victim of a tort done with malice, and who is aware of it, has been wronged more gravely than a victim of a tort done without malice and is, therefore, entitled to greater redress.

Torts Against the State

This chapter argues that the dominant “interpersonal accountability model of tort law” must be significantly amended to accommodate tort law’s protection of the interests of artificial persons. The chapter focuses on protection of state interests, in particular. It begins with a critical exposition of the interpersonal accountability model, highlighting the extent to which leading tort theorists share the assumption that torts are wrongs that are suffered by natural persons alone. Next, the chapter shows that and how the interpersonal accountability model neglects torts against the state, and offers a schema for categorizing these torts. The chapter concludes by tracing the implications of arguments developed in it. Among other things, it notes that understanding that tort law includes torts against the state calls into question the tendency to gloss torts as “private wrongs” and supports the practice of treating them as “civil wrongs.”

Torts

This chapter discusses the development of tort law in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tort law experienced its biggest growth spurt in the late nineteenth century. The legal world began to sit up and pay attention. The very first English-language treatise on torts appeared in 1859: Francis Hilliard’s book, The Law of Torts, Or Private Wrongs. Then came Charles G. Addison, Wrongs and Their Remedies in 1860, in England. By 1900, there was an immense literature on the law of torts; Joel Bishop and Thomas M. Cooley had written imposing treatises on the subject; the case law had swollen to heroic proportions. Tort law was a product of the industrial revolution; England here had a head start; problems emerged there first, and so did their tentative legal solutions.

Constructing Human Rights

Contemporary understandings of the drivers suggest that gender based violence is related much more to sociological factors and power relations than to individual psychology or culture—although it is transmitted through mentalities of gender regimes that organize ideologies and practice of gender roles and dominance. In this chapter, we will review the lessons learned from a generation of human rights scholarship on reforming such power relations. We will analyze why violence against women requires additional forms of action that flow from literature on expanding rights, private wrongs, rights interdependence, intersectionality, and distinct patterns of response to different syndromes of violation and gender regime locations.