Dec 3, 2025 Sandy Steel
Nico Cornell’s terrific book Wrongs and Rights Come Apart rejects the commonly held view that moral wrongs are simply moral right violations. Rather, wrongs and rights ‘come apart’: there can be wrongs without right violations and right violations without wrongs.
The book proceeds by providing a range of powerful examples from law, philosophical writing, and literature to make its case. How can we tell, in these examples, whether a person has been wronged but their rights not violated? Cornell provides an account of the characteristic features of an entity holding a right: (1) the power to waive the correlated duty, (2) the fact that certain conduct can be demanded by that person, (3) enforceability of the correlated duty, (4) the presence of a special kind of reason (a trump or an exclusionary reason), and (5) a distinctive phenomenology. (Pp. 14-15.)
None of these is argued to be necessary or individually sufficient; instead they are characteristic features; each provides evidence of the fact that a duty is grounded in, or correlated with, a right. If Cornell’s examples show that a person is wronged, yet (1)-(5) are all absent, then (assuming (1)-(5) give us all of the characteristics of rights) we have wrongs without right violations. (Pp. 16-17.)
It is impossible to do justice to the nuance and richness of the book in a Jot. I briefly outline and comment on some examples Cornell employs to prise apart wrongs and right violations, leaving aside his argument that there can be right violations that are not wrongs.
Intimate promises. For Cornell, promises to have sex or to love do not give rise to a right that another have sex or love, but the non-fulfilment of the promise wrongs the beneficiary. In relation to such promises, demandability and enforceability – features (2) and (3) above – are not present. One may not demand that a person perform their promise to have sex or enforce such a promise. Yet, if the promise is not fulfilled (without justification), it seems that the person has some kind of moral complaint. Cornell’s explanation neatly clarifies this apparent difference between the ex ante and ex post moral position: the promisee stands to be wronged, yet lacks a right to performance.
Three-party cases with unforeseeable victims. The basic structure of this kind of example is: A violates B’s right, with an unforeseeable harmful effect on C.
Palsgraf. Railroad employees (A) carelessly thrust a person (B) onto a train, with the result that their firework-containing package drops and explodes, causing a set of scales at the end of the platform to fall over and harm Palsgraf (C).
Overheard Lie. Suppose that you (C) overhear your coworker (B) talking to a customer (A) at work. Your coworker tells the customer that the South Bridge has been fixed and is now operational. Later that day, you are suffering from an asthma attack and need to rush to the hospital. You try to take the South Bridge only to find it closed, and you end up in a great deal of distress. Your coworker later tells you that he was lying because he does not like the customer. (Pp. 31-32.)
About both cases Cornell’s view is that C is wronged, but C’s rights are not violated. C is wronged because “[t]he familiar package of emotions and practices would seem to apply: resentment, apology, forgiveness, and so on.” It would be apt for Palsgraf to resent her having been injured through another’s carelessness and for the latter to give an apology; likewise, the co-worker in Overheard Lie ought to apologise for their lie that caused you great distress. C’s rights are not violated, however, as C, being unforeseeable, cannot figure in A’s deliberations about what to do, thus (I think) undermining (3), and perhaps (2).
Warranties. One of Cornell’s most intriguing putative examples of rightless wrongs is breach of warranty:
Suppose that I’m your roofer. I’ve done various repairs for you, and now you’ve hired me to replace your roof. At the end of the job, I promise you that the roof will last for at least twenty years. It fails miserably the next winter. On these facts, I do owe it to you to replace the roof and indemnify you for your losses. But that would not be performance; it would be a remedy for a failure. (P. 71.)
You are wronged, Cornell claims, because (i) “there would be a moral residue: even if I replace the roof, I still owe you an apology”; (ii) it would be normal to describe the promisor as not having kept his word; (iii) if it were merely a promise to indemnify, there would be nothing wrong with saying ‘I promise that the roof will last twenty years’, while knowing that it won’t last. (P. 72.)
Yet, Cornell argues, it is unclear how the promise that the roof will last for twenty years grounds a right. If rights necessarily constitute reasons capable of entering deliberation (3), the promise does not ground a right, since it does not specify any action and reasons are, well, reasons for action. True, the roofer has some reasons because of the promise—for instance, a reason to take steps to ensure that he can fulfil any liability that may arise for its non-fulfilment. But this is not a reason generated by there being a right. If the roofer had promised to repair if the roof did not last 20 years, then the roofer would have exactly the same reason to take steps to ensure that he can fulfil any liability so arising. As Cornell sums up: “…though it can be the basis for a wrong, the warranty may not generate any action-shaping duties. It’s not about action. It’s about a fact obtaining in the world.” (P. 71.)
Two quick responses to the first two categories of example. First, it does seem that intimate promises ought still to figure in deliberation, and not merely as a vanilla reason to be weighed in the balance with others. If a step-parent promises their partner that they will love the partner’s child, the promise gives the former at least a reason to try to love the child, and that reason is not merely to be weighed in the balance with others. Thus while it may be that this promise is not enforceable or demandable, it has a distinctive reason-giving importance; a properly-motivated promisor in this position will aptly feel a sense of moral failure if they are unable to live up to the reasons given by the promise, and the promise ought to figure in their deliberative horizon. In short, the promise still has the kind of reason-giving force that promises generally have, and so if that reason-giving force of a promise makes it right-grounding, then there is a right here.
Second, as to Palsgraf, consider the position if Palsgraf could see the heavy set of scales about to topple on her, and she could somehow redirect them so that they fell on the employees. Redirecting the scales seems permissible. So the unforeseeable third party has a special moral liberty to impose a right-infringing burden on the employees (special because her say-so seems to affect the permissibility of others acting on that liberty on her behalf). Thus, if one is tempted by the verdict that there is a moral wrong in this scenario, this is at least consistent with the enforceability characteristic of right-holding.
As to Overheard Lie, it is interesting to compare one’s (my) intuition in a variant in which the co-worker carelessly misrepresents the situation. Here it seems less clear that C has a legitimate grievance against B. Notably, the law tends to expose persons to liability in respect of unforeseeable harms when they behave with high culpability. Here one might say that everyone has a right not to suffer serious distress as a result of a lie. The foreseeability of reliance on the lie is neither here nor there.
Cornell’s warranty examples are the most difficult for a defender of wrongs-as-right-violations, since if we accept the intuition about the examples, the defender needs to decouple rights from reasons for action. But before we can trust intuitions about the roofer case, it would be useful to modify the example. One distracting feature is that the roof ‘fails miserably’ after a short time when it was guaranteed for twenty years. This inclines the reader to believe the construction was careless or that representing that the roof was of high quality was itself careless. Further, the example implies that there was at least a representation that the roof was sound and leaves open whether this was relied upon.
A modified version:
Suppose that I’m your roofer. I’ve successfully done various repairs for you, and now you’ve hired me to replace your roof. At the end of the job, which has been completed according to the highest standards of craft, I explain that, over the past twenty years, extensive research has revealed that roofs constructed in this way have never failed, though it is not entirely impossible, of course, that one will, and so I say “I am happy to promise you that the roof will last for at least twenty years.” You reply: “Well, I don’t believe that roofs of this kind will last that long, but I’m nonetheless happy to accept your promise.” The roof fails in 10 years, due to a weakness in one piece of timber that was undetectable.
Although the law holds that there is a right to the roof’s lasting for 20 years, morally, it seems inapt to blame or resent the builder if it did not here, or for the builder to feel guilt. The only ‘residue’ seems to be a distinctive reason to regret, and express regret, that things did not occur as promised. Perhaps when we make a promise in relation to a state of affairs (without promising to bring about the state), we establish a special agential connection with the non-occurrence of the state of affairs, such that we have special reason to regret its non-occurrence, and perhaps to communicate our regret to the beneficiary. Still, this is not moral wronging. The law’s describing warranties in terms of rights and duties to states of affairs is explicable in practical terms: by encasing the occurrence of a fact in a contractual duty, the parties can straightforwardly assent to a measure of compensation if the state of affairs does not occur, and can import other rules that hinge upon breach.
Whatever one makes of these last points (and Cornell has many more examples to contend with!) the book amply succeeds in mounting a sophisticated challenge to orthodox thinking on the relation between right violations and wrongs; it deserves to be widely read.
Nov 3, 2025 Cristina Tilley
Tom Baker,
What Is Insurance for Tort Law?, 111
Va. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025), available at
SSRN.
It is a truth rarely acknowledged by tort theorists that personal injury lawyers in possession of good plaintiffs must also be in want of insured defendants. Tom Baker acknowledges that truth in What is Insurance for Tort Law?, and follows it to some bracing conclusions. Baker’s article is a welcome rejoinder to Kenneth Abraham and Catherine Sharkey’s recent call to treat insurance as a constitutive part of tort doctrine and practice. Abraham and Sharkey embrace liability insurance as an economically “beneficial” aspect of tort practice that “spreads the risk of tort liability, []helps to promote safety, ensures compensation for some tort victims who would otherwise not be compensated, and enables planning and budgeting . . . by potential defendants.” Not so fast, Baker warns. When an insurance eminence like Baker issues a warning, it’s a good idea to listen. Yes, he agrees, tort and insurance are in the symbiotic business of distributing compensation. But Baker argues that tort should aspire to non-economic goals like corrective justice, and then artfully demonstrates how yoking injury outcomes to insurance pricing mechanisms can hobble that goal.
Baker begins with a frank and comprehensive look at how liability insurance influences tort in action. Because insurance “provides the money that changes hands through tort claiming,” (P. 8) lawyers who earn contingency fees are reluctant to sue uninsured defendants and insured defendants typically cede control over litigation to insurers. And because the universe of tort cases is determined by the infrastructure of insurance, tort doctrine has developed in ways that reflect and amplify the interests of insurers. For example, insurers who manage large pools of litigation are positioned to cherry-pick cases as vehicles for friendly changes to procedural and doctrinal rules. (Pp. 12-15.) Further, by tracing verdicts back to centralized insurers rather than to decentralized defendants, lobbyists can depict plaintiff compensation as an “insurance crisis” that justifies anti-plaintiff legislative reforms like damage caps, the restriction of joint and several liability, and limits to the collateral source rule. (Pp. 17-18.) Most notably, plaintiffs lawyers fill their rosters with clients whose claims can “plead into” existing insurance. Consequently, they prioritize cases involving premises liability, bodily injury, and property damage and devalue cases involving pure emotional or economic loss. (P. 15.)
So insurance lurks in the offices and courtrooms where tort is practiced. Does that reality make tort more – or possibly less – likely to fulfill any of the theoretical objectives that scholars assign to it? If tort’s primary goal is compensation, Baker grants, insurance has helped achieve it by “supercharging the claims that can be made for tort law as a compensation system” in which an aggregation of tort claims spreads losses throughout a networked economy. (P. 19.)
But Baker points out some difficult corollaries that might follow the systemization of tort compensation. For one thing, it can tempt some judges to widgetize individuals as components of a “mechanized society,” thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of compensation for intangible suffering. (P. 20.) For another, once compensation is centralized in systemic fashion, it can just as easily be reduced as enhanced through centralized means (see his observations about cherry-picking and tort reform). (Pp. 20-21.) If, in contrast, tort’s primary objective is deterrence, Baker concludes that the insurance infrastructure can both advance and undercut that goal. At least as a matter of theory, insurance companies maximize profit by paying fewer claims, and reduce payment obligations by incentivizing their insureds to adopt loss-prevention practices, thus producing deterrent effects. On the other hand, he observes that actors relieved of a personal obligation to pay judgments might grow indifferent to the costs of the injuries they impose, thus undercutting deterrent effects, though they might still remain sensitive to the disapproval of their community peers. He cautions against bold claims of insurance-driven deterrence, noting that “how any of this falls out in practice is an empirical question.” (P. 23.)
Baker treads familiar ground in evaluating the influence of insurance on compensation and deterrence. No surprise, as both goals stem from academic interest in the human relationship to money – whether as a proxy for well-being or as a driver of behavior. He then breaks exciting new ground by asking how insurance might advance or undercut tort goals that concern the human relationship to other humans. When it comes to tort’s corrective justice powers, Baker credits insurance for making possible the payment of an interpersonal debt the defendant is found to owe a plaintiff he has injured. (P. 25.) At the same time, he reminds us, when insurance is unavailable for select wrongs, or is inaccessible to select populations, it is making impossible the payment of otherwise valid interpersonal debts. (P. 25.)
The theoretical goal of retribution, too – imposition of consequences for morally culpable conduct – is fraught by the contours of liability insurance. Baker claims that tort facilitates retribution when a private plaintiff sues on behalf of the larger community. (P. 26.) So if the defendant is found to owe the community some performance of remorse, externalizing that obligation onto a corporate insurer runs counter to the retribution goal. This concern, Baker contends, explains why so many states outlaw insurance for punitive damages, intentional torts, and criminal fines. (P. 25.) But these rules may inhibit actual compensation – and metaphorical retribution – for plaintiffs injured by intentional or egregious conduct.
Baker’s ultimate quarrel, it seems, is with the justice theorists’ habit of treating insurance as “outside the considerations that should determine tort law doctrine.” (P. 36.) Glib refusals to consider the role of insurance, Baker reminds us, artificially sanitize justice accounts of tort. The truth is that insurance companies need not and do not make their products universally or affordably available to all of the putative defendants in the country. Some communities and members of some demographic groups simply cannot access insurance. (P. 37.) Relatedly, some wrongs are not insurable in today’s market. (P. 37.) Consequently plaintiffs whose well-being suffers in insurance-poor communities are denied corrective justice thanks to the needs of insurance balance sheets. Corrective justice theorists do not claim to be interested in state-driven distribution of resources, Baker grants. But when the resource is insurance, and its distribution channels corrective justice to some demographics and away from others, Baker seems impatient with justice theorists’ excessive abstraction.
That impatience culminates late in the article when Baker declares that his “project” is to deploy insurance in the service of corrective justice. On its own, this project will enrich tort theory. And happily, Baker hints his project may be even more ambitious. For example, he chooses to treat community retribution as theoretically adjacent to corrective justice (not a mainstream move in tort theory). By collapsing injured individuals and injured communities into the same basket, (Pp. 37-38) Baker invites the reader to discern corrective justice and social justice critiques of contemporary tort insurance in his work. Similarly, when he observes that the absence of insurance “within a community or a demographic group” means that victims of wronging within those groups struggle for justice, widely available scholarship documenting underinsurance among racial minority groups leaves little doubt exactly whose justice he considers to be most in jeopardy. As the efficiency-versus-correction debate in tort theory turns to the role of insurance, correctives could not hope for a more cogent or credible voice than Baker’s.
Cite as: Cristina Tilley,
Price and Prejudice, JOTWELL
(November 3, 2025) (reviewing Tom Baker,
What Is Insurance for Tort Law?, 111
Va. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025), available at SSRN),
https://torts.jotwell.com/price-and-prejudice/.
Oct 6, 2025 Kenneth W. Simons
Emad H. Atiq,
The Disaggregated Hand Formula, 114
Cal. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (Mar. 1, 2025).
The Learned Hand test is both famous and infamous. The main source of its fame is the law and economics movement, which drew attention to the test in the 1970’s. According to Richard Posner and other scholars in that movement, the test is both a descriptively accurate account of how legal fact-finders understand negligence, and a normatively attractive account of why tort law imposes liability for harms caused by negligence—namely, to promote efficiency and minimize the aggregate costs of precautions and the harms that precautions could avoid.
But the Hand test is also infamous. The test provides that an actor is negligent just in case the burden of taking a precaution (B) is less than the probability of the harm that the precaution would have avoided multiplied by the severity of that harm (PxL). Critics protest that the test is not an accurate account of how the law defines negligence. And more fundamentally, they object that treating this formula as the test of negligence is normatively objectionable, indeed abhorrent. If the burden is only slightly more than the expected harm (the harm’s severity discounted by its probability), the formula declares that the actor may freely impose the risk without fear of tort liability if the risk generates harms–even very serious harms–to others.
Professor Emad Atiq, in an illuminating and highly original contribution, suggests that there is a middle way. In The Disaggregated Hand Formula, he argues that one can endorse balancing the burden of precautions against the burden of suffering harm and yet reject efficiency as the only goal of tort liability. Rather, in his view, the Hand test can also embrace principles of distributive fairness and equality. He claims that this reconceived understanding renders the test more accurate as a description of tort doctrine and leading cases, and also more normatively attractive, in multiparty cases involving aggregation. Atiq’s account is a very promising addition to the literature on the meaning of negligence and the principles that justify negligence liability.
Atiq sets up his argument nicely. Why, in the well-known Ford Pinto and McDonald coffee cases, does cost-benefit analysis that militated against a negligence finding seem problematic, whereas in other, apparently similar cases, such as the failure of a manufacturer to childproof its lighters, it seems acceptable? If we interpret the Hand formula in the standard way, as simply comparing, in a utilitarian manner, the aggregate burdens of taking a precaution against the aggregate expected harms that the precaution would avoid, we cannot explain this pattern of results.
Atiq offers an alternative explanation. Principles of impartiality and equality require us to disaggregate the Hand formula in the following way: compare the highest individual burden that would be suffered by someone if the precaution is taken, against the highest individual burden (in the form of expected harm) that would be suffered by someone if the precaution is not taken. (This approach draws in part on the contractarian approach to aggregation espoused by T.M. Scanlon and other philosophers.)
How would this interpretation play out? If a corporation could spend $1001 to avoid a 10% risk of a $10,000 injury to a single resident’s property, with the burden of that spending equally spread among 100 shareholders, the utilitarian version of the Hand formula would say that the precaution need not be taken, because the aggregate B slightly exceeds the aggregate PxL. But Atiq’s version would require the precaution, because the greatest burden suffered by an individual shareholder ($10.01) is far less than the expected loss suffered by the resident ($1,000). “The lone resident’s morally weighty claim in favor of the precaution should prevail even though the shareholders have a greater aggregate claim against the precautions.” (P. 128.) Conversely, suppose that a business owner could take a precaution against the very small risk that the sharp envelopes she sells will cause minor papercuts to many users, and suppose that the owner is unable to pass along the cost of the precaution to consumers. Then, even if the utilitarian calculus would determine that the business owner is negligent because the costs of the precaution are less than the sum of the expected losses, Atiq’s approach would not treat the owner as negligent, because her burden is considerably greater than the individual loss suffered by any user. (P. 131.)
Atiq applies his analysis to the Ford Pinto case, which (to simplify) arose when Ford chose not to adopt an $11-per-car safety feature that could have avoided serious burn injuries (valued at $67,000 each) and deaths (valued at $200,000 each) because the aggregate costs of adopting the feature for all vehicles ($137 million) outweighed the aggregate benefits of avoiding those consequences ($49.5 million). Faced with a government cost-benefit study reflecting these figures, the jury not only found Ford negligent but imposed a $125 million punitive damage award.
But according to Atiq, the compensatory and punitive damages awarded against Ford for its product design do not reflect a complete rejection of the Hand test. Instead, they evince the use of the disaggregated version of the test. Atiq points out that even if the $200,000 value of a life was a proper average figure to employ in 1970, many potential victims (such as children) had much higher life values than this figure. (Pp. 152-153.) And if that higher expected value for some potential victims is increased to $1,000,000, the calculation would, he correctly notes, come out differently: B would then be less than rather than greater than P x L. Similarly, he argues that the $11-per-car burden is likely overstated, because this burden would probably be shared by consumers and shareholders. Atiq offers a very similar analysis of the McDonald’s hot coffee case.
Atiq is persuasive in suggesting that the Hand formula need not be understood in utilitarian terms and can accommodate distributive justice and egalitarian principles. The article is an impressive blend of the abstract and the concrete, developing a theoretically sophisticated analysis that also has quite specific implications for tort doctrine and case outcomes. Atiq formalizes his arguments elegantly, suggesting a way to measure the idea of rough equality of burdens (P. 138) and also offering an intriguing proposal to combine utilitarian and egalitarian arguments by specifying their relative weights. (P 143.) At the same time, he formulates a jury instruction that would implement his suggestion in routine negligence cases.
One principal concern about Atiq’s argument is its potentially far-reaching implications. Any widely distributed product or widely conducted activity will affect individuals who vary enormously along a number of dimensions that seem highly relevant under the disaggregated version of the Hand formula. For example, people differ greatly in their vulnerability to risk. So long as a single user or potential victim of a product that is used by millions is extraordinarily vulnerable to risk, that person’s burden could require the actor to take very burdensome precautions to avoid that risk. (Suppose a tiny percentage of car passengers have a rare genetic disorder such that sudden braking will cause them to die.)
People also differ greatly in what they value and how much they value it (and thus what burden they will suffer if they must take a precaution or if they are harmed because a precaution was not taken): Hotter coffee or greater safety? Financial wealth or love and friendship? Job security or hedonistic pleasure?
Moreover, the “highest burden to any individual” criterion seems to require actors to adjust their conduct to accommodate even extremely idiosyncratic and rare individual preferences. Perhaps some McDonald’s customers strongly prefer that their coffee have zero risk of spilling and be served in a completely spill-proof container. Perhaps some very healthy individuals strongly prefer that ambulances never speed because they are quite unlikely to need an ambulance.
Another concern is that the argument tends to focus on costs of precautions in isolation without considering their cumulative effect on the increased cost (or modified nature) of the product or activity. For example, Atiq emphasizes that in litigation about whether the lack of childproofing of a utility lighter was negligent, the burden of only 1-5 cents increased cost to consumers from that precaution is “negligible.” (P. 159.) But for a more complex product, such as an automobile, it is important to consider the cumulative costs that would be incurred if numerous small design changes were required. A significantly more pro-plaintiff test of design defect could result in the product becoming much less affordable, a result that raises a distinctive issue of distributive justice.
Perhaps these concerns can be addressed by incorporating such distributive justice issues into the model, or by adding doctrinal qualifications to the disaggregated formula, such as a requirement that the type of burden that plaintiff asserts is foreseeable or normal or not unreasonable. I hope that Professor Atiq explores these issues in more detail in future writing.
This creative and rigorous article makes a strong case that the Hand formula is capable of multiple interpretations, accommodating distributive justice as well as utilitarian principles.
Sep 2, 2025 Ellen Bublick
In the age of artificial intelligence (and statistics before that), there is a great need for these frameworks’ constant companion – data. After centuries of common law tort actions, and millions of lawsuits filed, one might think that much would be known about these suits. Not so. As James Anderson and co-authors from the Rand Institute for Civil Justice write, “Remarkably, there is little recent empirical research in the United States that measures the extent and sources of compensation, benefits, and assistance that individuals may receive after they suffer personal harms.” (Pp. 97-98.) Tort law counts among these empirically-neglected sources.
Anderson and the current RAND crew set out to fill this information gap. In tribute to Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Hensler and her pioneering empirical work on civil justice claims, the authors surveyed 17,000+ adult Americans about injuries, illness, and the ways in which losses from these difficulties were addressed. Using a standard that measured respondents’ lost days of work, inability to perform regular activities, multiple visits to a healthcare provider, nights in the hospital and visits to the emergency room, the researchers winnowed the group down to roughly 3,000 people who had suffered “significant injury or illness” under the study criteria in 2017. (P. 98.) Those 3000 people were asked to provide detailed information about the extent and manner of their injuries or illness; the harms, treatments, and expenses they endured; the sources of compensation they relied on; their views about attribution of blame; and their decisions to consult a lawyer, initiate suit, and pursue a claim. About two years after these first inquiries, the researchers sent follow up questions to learn more.
The authors’ findings provide an important source of data that will likely be relied on for years to come (unfortunately, as the authors note, “empirical methods are still more the exception than the rule” in this field). (P. 115.) Some headline findings of the research: Nearly 20% of Americans experience significant injury or illness, as defined by the authors, in a given year. However, only a tiny fraction of those harms results in litigation. About one quarter of individuals who suffer significant injury or illness attribute blame to another (26.1%). (P. 97.) Of the small fraction who thought another was at fault, less than a third (7.1%) chose to seek compensation from that entity (or person). Few of those who sought redress contacted an attorney, somewhat fewer hired an attorney, and fewer still filed a lawsuit. Ultimately, just 2.1% of the people who suffered significant injury or illness filed suit.
The primary rationale for the small percentage of people who claim is that “few who are injured or fall ill believe another party is responsible.” (P. 97.) Even when others were believed to have been responsible, many declined to seek compensation because it seemed like it was “not the right thing to do,” was not necessary in light of other sources of compensation, or “would not be worth it” on an informal cost-benefit calculation. (P. 102.)
The characteristics of those who sought legal assistance and compensation held some surprises. For example, the authors found “no correlation between income and contacting or hiring an attorney.” (P. 102.) Moreover, in pursuit of legal representation, 53% of all prospective plaintiffs were turned away by an attorney, usually because of the cost of suit and the low likelihood of recovery. This rate of attorneys denying representation was more than double the rate in Professor Hensler’s original research thirty years earlier. (P. 101.) However, about three quarters of those who contacted an attorney ultimately did file suit. (Some respondents had to contact multiple attorneys to find one willing to take the case.) (P. 102.)
Other findings seem more expected. The most significant factors that led injured or ill people to legal claims were severity of injury, attribution of fault to another, and an injury context in which tort claims already were well established (injuries related to medical services, work, products, and motor vehicles). (P. 101.) Of note, these contexts are ones in which insurance is typically available (cap tip to the Abraham and Sharkey research on the importance of insurance in the growth of tort liability). Injured potential claimants’ decision formula for when to seek compensation seems fairly close to Judge Learned Hand’s famed BPL standard. That standard examines severity of injury and cost of avoidance among its three factors. Respondents who had suffered “extremely serious injury or illness,“ and had attributed blame to another, sought compensation in 93% of cases—a percentage that stands in stark contrast to the much lower claim rates of those who described their injuries as less severe. Claimants’ decision formula also accords with civil recourse theory’s focus on wrongs, and the main doctrinal questions in negligence law—is another at fault for causing harm?
If tort law is not invoked by 98% of the people who suffer seriously injury or illness, “How do individuals recover losses associated with injuries and illnesses, if at all?” (P. 97.) Workers compensation plays a role. But oddly, study participants’ reluctance to attribute fault and seek compensation in tort carried over to the workers compensation context as well (if to a lesser extent). “[O]nly 29% of those who were injured or became ill on the job filed workers compensation claims.” (P. 103). The most common reason people gave for not filing workers compensation claims was that the injury “wasn’t anyone’s fault,” even though workers compensation is a no-fault system. (P. 103.) Medical insurance was one of the most widely-used sources of compensation, and its use has increased over the last three decades, likely because of the Affordable Care Act. (P. 103.) Paid vacation and sick days were also a popular option for dealing with injuries. (P. 103.)
The question of exactly what should be done about tort law in light of these findings remains hazy. The RAND authors conclude that “the civil justice system makes a terrible social welfare insurance system simply because it compensates such a tiny fraction of the universe of individuals that are injured or ill.” (P. 104.) Moreover, the authors conclude that tort law is not a full substitute for regulation of risky activity, because it is invoked in such a small fraction of cases. (P. 110.) These conclusions seem both true and uncontroversial, at least in their strong form. Few, if any, U.S. torts scholars would claim that tort law is intended to act as a general social welfare system, or that its deterrent effects should serve as a full replacement for regulation.
Study authors appear to suggest that tort law must have a larger footprint to be of any value. They bemoan the “partly chimerical right of civil recourse.” (P. 109.) They decry the idea that tort law can be a meaningful source of loss spreading. (P. 107.) Whether or not one agrees with these claims (2 percent of tens of millions of significant harms, especially the most significant harms, seems a decent sized footprint), the implication of the RAND authors’ work is that too few lawsuits are being pursued. (P. 115.) Go tell that to businesses and legislatures!
Of course, it is crucial to have systems that care for the many people impacted by injury and illness—medical insurance, sick days, workers comp, and social security disability among these. This vital safety net can lessen the weight of costs that an injured or ill person must individually bear. At the same time, the civil justice system, though less frequently deployed, may yet play a meaningful role. By addressing those cases in which wrongful conduct causes severe injury in contexts of repeated harm (where tracts of liability have already been cultivated), tort law can not only aid the most injured claimants, but also potentially reduce the large number of injuries and illness caused to others. To gauge not just the potential, but also the actual, accountability and deterrence created by the tort system, perhaps these skilled authors could, in their next study, survey repeat injurers about how much time and money they spend worrying about, and reshaping conduct in light of, the various compensation systems. It would be interesting to see if efforts to reduce workers compensation premiums and reduce sick time command the same concern, attention, and resources that lawsuits, and potential suits, in the civil justice system demand.
Sep 2, 2025 Christopher J. Robinette
The vast majority of tort cases are settled, and many of the settlements include confidentiality provisions that prevent the public from learning about the allegedly wrongful conduct. This has been true for decades, but the confidentiality provisions—nondisclosure agreements (“NDAs”)—have become increasingly controversial. The #MeTooMovement provided momentum to criticism of NDAs, and multiple states and even the federal government have passed legislation restricting their use.
But do such “sunshine laws” matter to plaintiffs? Noting the lack of empirical data on the issue, Professor Gilat Juli Bachar fills the void with the first article to examine the “extent to which a confidentiality clause affects plaintiffs…when weighing a settlement offer….” (P. 1260.) Such information is important because “the real-world impact of sunshine laws ultimately depends on the litigants themselves.” (P. 1206.) Not only does Professor Bachar shed light on how NDAs are perceived, but she also delves further to identify other factors affecting a plaintiff’s willingness to settle. Bachar’s excellent article is useful on the prominent issue of NDAs, and her methods have the potential to reveal information crucial to a better-functioning civil justice system.
Because of the difficulty of speaking to actual plaintiffs, Bachar relies on a vignette design, putting participants in the shoes of plaintiffs. (P. 1228.) She surveys a representative sample of Americans, inquiring about the extent to which they would accept a settlement offer (the main dependent variable). (P. 1227.) Bachar manipulates two main independent variables: settlement confidentiality and repeat wrongdoing. (P. 1227.) Additionally, Bachar examines three other independent variables: the amount of the settlement, the existence of a sanction against the wrongdoer as part of the settlement terms, and the context of the scenario (products liability manufacturing defect versus sexual harassment). (P. 1229.)
Bachar divides the participants into four groups, with each group randomly assigned to one of four conditions representing combinations of the two main independent variables. The groups are: (1) confidential + first-time wrongdoer; (2) confidential + repeat wrongdoer; (3) public + first-time wrongdoer; and (4) public + repeat wrongdoer. (P. 1231.) In all conditions, participants read two fictional vignettes, one from products liability and one from sexual harassment. For each scenario, participants were presented with variations to the original vignette, adjusting the amount of the settlement offer and including a provision imposing a sanction on the wrongdoer. (P. 1232.)
Bachar cautiously notes the limitations on vignette design and acknowledges that her results should be confirmed. (Pp. 1246-47.) Her main results, however, are robust and noteworthy. First, repeat wrongdoing decreases settlement likelihood. (P. 1247.) Information about the defendant being a repeat wrongdoer significantly decreases the likelihood of settlement, regardless of the demand for confidentiality or lack thereof, in both the products liability and sexual harassment scenarios. (P. 1247.) Second, confidentiality decreases settlement likelihood. (P. 1250.) This was true even against a first-time wrongdoer, and true in both scenarios, though stronger in sexual harassment cases. (Pp. 1251-52.) Third, more money increases settlement likelihood, including when confidential. (P. 1252.) In fact, offering a larger amount eliminates much of the preference for a public settlement. Fourth, participants are more willing to settle a products liability dispute than one about sexual harassment. (P. 1254.)
Bachar focuses on the last point, that participants are more willing to settle a products case than a sexual harassment case. (Pp. 1254-59.) In so doing, she highlights a separate finding on adding a sanction: “when considering a settlement offer, the defendant suffering a sanction mattered more to sexual harassment plaintiffs than it did to products liability plaintiffs.” (P. 1257.) Bachar makes the further observation that the liability standards for the two scenarios are different. A manufacturing defect receives a true strict liability (no-fault) standard and sexual harassment would receive several different standards depending on the claim, but all involve fault. (Pp. 1254-55.) The conclusion she reaches is that although a manufacturing defect is a legal wrong, sexual harassment “was perceived as more morally ‘wrong.’” (P. 1257.)
This insight into wrongful conduct, when combined with the fact that repeated wrongdoing and confidentiality reduce a plaintiff’s desire to settle, allows Bachar to conclude that “there is more to this [settlement] decision than a desire for self-restoration or to maximize a monetary payout a claim produces.” (P. 1260.) Although more money increases the likelihood of settlement even when confidential, her conclusion is sound. The wrongfulness of tort causes of action varies from claim to claim. It is on the low end for manufacturing defects and on the high end for behavior that can be described as sexual harassment. Moreover, victims’ reactions to being wronged vary from person to person, with some victims wanting accountability from the wrongdoer and others more focused on simply repairing the harm.
The relevance of this article goes beyond the question of settlement confidentiality. People pursue different goals in the settlement process because people file suit for different reasons. Bachar is beginning to provide information on why victims of wrongdoing step forward and file suit. Understanding why tort victims sue is increasingly important. Despite the contingent fee, tort law suffers from an access-to-justice problem that is only worsening because of tort reform and technological advances, which make tort cases more complex and thus slower and more expensive. Potential plaintiffs are discouraged by the time and money needed to pursue civil justice, and, in deciding to take a case, plaintiffs’ lawyers insist on increasingly higher damages to justify the risk of a lack of recovery.
In a forthcoming book chapter, I argue that creating a bypass—a simpler, cheaper procedure perhaps with reduced damages—as an option for the parties has the potential to provide access to justice for more wronged victims. Expediting the resolution of claims would help realize tort law’s promise as a law of wrongs and recourse, likely without significantly undermining the law’s deterrent effects. By providing crucial information about why victims file and settle tort suits, Bachar’s work informs us how many victims might be interested in a tort bypass and influence its design.
Professor Bachar is a welcome addition to tort scholars, with her empirical methodology, clear writing, and focus on critical issues. I look forward to reading her pieces for years to come.
Jul 21, 2025 Anita Bernstein
Writers who study torts tend to engage with liability as a force or vector that imposes consequences on parties accused of injuring others. For most of us in this field, liability means accountability or reckoning. This occupational interest in what tort does in action, or can do when it’s enlisted, can obscure the impacts of shelters from accountability.
Removing Torts marks Betsy Grey’s return to a source of tort nonaccountability that Professor Grey knows backwards and forwards, the statutory kind. This refuge has ample company in the land of shelters. Fortuitousness, for example, also fends off reckoning: Prospective defendants get lucky when prospective plaintiffs don’t know what hit them, run out of time or money, fail to clear the intake criteria of a contingent-fee attorney, on and on. Judge-made immunities of the common law—especially the intrafamily and charitable kind—are more orderly, though they’ve dwindled into something of a quaint oddball relic.
The shelter of immunity provisioned by statute is not fortuitous or in decline. It’s formal, official, categorical, out in the open for anyone to look up. It enlists judges as enforcers—and does so in a hierarchical way, sharing little power with them. Statutes of limitation provide an affirmative defense to liability that delivers immunity with almost no room for judicial discretion. Preemption, though a judge-made doctrine, can immunize a defendant only with a pertinent statute on the books. In short, legislatures hold unique strengths to crush tort reckoning.
Grey has been sounding an alarm about this power for at least 28 years. Published in February 2025 (though with a 2024 citation date), Removing Torts revisits themes broached in her 1997 warning Make Congress Speak Clearly: Federal Preemption of State Tort Remedies. In Removing Torts, Grey both widens and sharpens her long-held worry about the danger of shelter by statute.
The new wider lens in Removing Torts looks beyond preemption as a statutory source of tort immunity, paying more direct attention to five other instances of the phenomenon. Grey gathers (1) state and federal legislation enacted to protect a range of businesses in response to Covid, a topic that received prompt commentary from Grey in 2021; (2) immunity for airlines for 9/11 claims; (3) gun manufacturer immunity; (4) the workers’ compensation barrier to tort claims; and (5) Section 230 immunity as a protector of online platforms. (P.136.)
What’s sharper in addition to wider about Grey’s agenda in Removing Torts is the uptick in her current demand. Make Congress Speak Clearly had pushed for disclosure and transparency about consequences; it told legislators what to say about their actions. Removing Torts tells legislators what to do, a task list that includes but is not limited to providing information.
“Legislatures,” Grey writes, “should make a consistent set of evidence-based findings and apply the principle of balancing before ousting tort remedies” (P. 154). If legislators follow what Grey tells them to do, they will take “four transparent steps” before they codify statutory immunity: identify the public interest that their immunity enhances, determine the impact that liability now has on the sector they seek to protect, consider how immunity could diminish “the accountability, deterrence, and compensation functions traditionally provided by torts,” and tailor the immunity they provide “to minimize interference with tort policies.” (P. 137).
The latter half of this undertaking would remind lawmakers that tort law is worth celebrating. Professor Grey reviews (Pp. 156-61) several good things that go away when immunity thwarts tort. Back in Make Congress Speak Clearly, Grey spoke about states as holders of a “right” to offer “a compensatory remedy for their injured citizens.” (Make Congress Speak Clearly, P. 565) Rights discourse tends to depict the state as threatening (and sometimes safeguarding) rights rather than holding a right for their own benefit. Grey upends this convention to good effect. Tort liability imposes force on a public that must obey, yes, but liability itself is a vulnerable political condition. The accountability it delivers has powerful enemies.
“Legislatures … should.” “Make Congress speak clearly.” “[E]xceptional circumstances” might be necessary to justify a legislature’s choice “to alter or eliminate access to tort redress.” (P. 178). Grey says so, but how many divisions does she have? Skeptical readers might wonder when and how Grey will extract the cooperation that her proposals need to get off the ground.
The proposer herself seems of two minds on the question of whether legislators will heed her call. On one hand, Grey’s conclusion back in Make Congress Speak Clearly sounded confident: “Congress gains little from writing ambiguous statutes.” (Make Congress Speak Clearly, P. 627) This powerful legislature knows what it wants, and the American public can expect it to act in its own interest. On the other hand, just a few pages earlier in that same article Grey took a different stance: “If Congress is not required to speak clearly,” then “it is likely to avoid its responsibility.” (Id.; P. 618). The latter posture sounds right to me; I’m inclined to agree with pessimistic Grey.
Yet plenty of potential remains in Grey’s exhortation that legislators fulfill occupational and constitutional obligations rooted in democratic federalism. Removing Torts sends a directive to state actors that combines high ideals and a clear path forward. Grey cannot compel any legislature to follow her “four transparent steps,” but individuals who serve in these bodies can learn what’s in her recommendations and make choices.
I’d like to see what might be dubbed “the Grey Principles” emerge as a banner that legislators and candidates for legislative office could embrace. Interlocutors in turn can ask these individuals where they stand on Grey’s insistence that legislation be read with reference to the work of other constitutional actors, especially courts.
“Tort liability exists,” a Grey Principles exponent can begin when addressing a candidate for legislative office. “After you’re elected you may learn about a bill that codifies immunity from that liability. Will you identify the public interest at stake, work to learn the impact of liability on the sector affected, consider the effects immunity will have on the policies that tort honors, and tailor whatever immunity you and your colleagues enact to minimize the interference with the good things tort does?” Candidates who are incumbents will have made choices that can be scrutinized through a Grey Principles lens.
Political conditions facilitate that scrutiny. An onlooker who wants to apply the Grey Principles has access to the (relative) transparency and accessibility of campaign platforms, durable statements that candidates for office make about themselves, on-the-record questioning of candidates by journalists, legislative deliberations on the floor, logs of legislators’ votes, and legislatures’ punishment-and-reward schemes, some of which are intelligible from the outside.
There’s more. I’ve remarked that tort immunity as installed by legislatures shares little power with judges: but it does share some. Judges have occasions to assess, and sometimes invalidate, statutes that dole out this benefit. Tort immunity rendered by preemption, for example, has occupied multiple U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Reviewing courts can examine the legislative record for information about its adherence (or, perhaps more likely, its nonadherence) to the Grey Principles.
Lawyers who defend immunizing statutes can use documents like memoranda in support of summary judgment to tell judges about the regard that legislatures had for the benefits of keeping liability alive. Opponents of immunity in the same litigation might have contrary facts to present. Going back to the stages of legislation before enactment, activists can seed a source of immunity with Grey Principles content. Well before a president or governor signs a bill, its legislative history can be populated with references to the importance of tort liability.
Warning has a long heritage in tort. This measure often fails to deliver safety, but it can spur useful conduct. Professor Grey has warned her audience to beware the unseen dangers of shelter and then, at least to this reader, goes further: I find in Removing Torts a timely plan for action.
Jun 23, 2025 Nora Freeman Engstrom
Jonathan Cardi, Ashton Jenne, & Chance Villarreal,
The Paradox of Continuing Risk, available at
SSRN (May 5, 2025).
In The Paradox of Continuing Risk, W. Jonathan Cardi, Ashton Jenne, and Chance Villarreal surface and incisively explore a consequential puzzle. Across the United States, 32 jurisdictions have adopted the continuing-risk rule, which imposes an affirmative duty to warn, protect, or rescue others from continuing risks created by one’s conduct. But despite the multitude of courts that have endorsed the rule—and the rule’s unbroken acceptance in various Torts Restatements—few actual cases apply this principle.
To start, it’s important to understand what exactly the continuing-risk rule does and why it matters.
The rule is well-summarized in the Restatement Third of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm § 39. Published in 2012, § 39 provides: “When an actor’s prior conduct, even though not tortious, creates a continuing risk of physical harm of a type characteristic of the conduct, the actor has a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent or minimize the harm.”
The idea, then, is that a doctor who implanted a Dalkon Shield in a patient before the IUD’s dangers came to light has an affirmative duty to warn the patient once those risks become apparent. If it weren’t for the rule, a doctor who breached no duty to the patient at the time of the IUD’s implantation—and took no action thereafter—would presumably face no liability.
Or think of a driver whose car suddenly stalls, creating a dangerous condition for fellow motorists. Under the continuing-risk rule, the driver has a duty reasonably to mitigate the hazard.
Or suppose a manufacturer sells a product that initially seems safe, but the risk of the product gradually becomes apparent. Under the ALI’s Product Liability Restatement, assuming the risk is significant, the seller has a limited duty to warn.
Or finally, consider this scenario, adapted from an Illustration in the First Restatement:
Reasonably believing his car is in good repair, one Friday afternoon, Mel lends his vehicle to his next-door neighbor, Fielding. Later that evening, Mel’s wife mentions to him that, when she was driving the car earlier in the day, the vehicle’s brakes were sluggish and unresponsive. Mel doesn’t pass this information along. Unaware that the brakes are on the fritz, on Saturday morning, Fielding drives the car as he had planned. The brakes fail, and Fielding is injured in the ensuing collision.
The First Restatement explains that, pursuant to the continuing-risk rule, Mel is subject to liability to Fielding, even though, at the moment he acted (on Friday afternoon, when he handed off his keys to Mel), he was personally free of blame.
Essentially then, the continuing-risk rule reverses the classic no-duty-to-rescue rule. But critically, it does so only in a discrete and narrowly defined set of circumstances. One narrowing mechanism involves characteristic risk. The rule does not impose liability whenever the defendant sets in motion a chain of events that eventually culminates in any conceivable injury to the plaintiff. Instead, per the Third Restatement, the continuing-risk rule applies only when the harm that befalls the plaintiff is “of a type characteristic of the [defendant’s] conduct.” Elaborating on this restriction, an Illustration provides:
Bill, who has two tickets to a basketball game between Wake Forest University and the University of Texas, takes his friend Mike, a Wake Forest fan, along. At the end of the game, Mike, distracted by the trouncing his team suffered, slips and falls down several rows of stairs and seriously injures himself. Bill, who is nearby at the time of the fall, has no duty of care to Mike to assist him pursuant to this Section, even though Bill, by taking Mike to the game, is a factual cause of Mike’s harm. Merely taking a friend to a sports event does not create a characteristic risk of slipping and falling.
Another limitation is also critical (and easily overlooked): Like other affirmative-duty rules, the continuing-risk rule—even when it applies—merely opens the door to liability. It doesn’t establish it. In the stalled motorist scenario set forth above, for instance, the driver might take no precaution and still (appropriately!) face no liability. Perhaps given the road conditions, it is entirely reasonable for a stranded motorist to simply sit tight.
But, even with both these key caveats, it’s clear that the continuing-risk rule is a useful resource for many plaintiffs. Without it, given the defendant’s (at least recent) nonfeasance, it’ll be hard to establish a duty. With it, the duty element (at least) is satisfied.
It is surprising, then, as Professor Cardi and co-authors show: Although the continuing-risk rule is on the books in a strong majority of states, its actual application is exceptional. According to the authors, only in Texas and West Virginia is the rule cited frequently. In all other jurisdictions, fewer than ten cases have relied on it.
Adding to the mystery: This limited reliance can’t be chalked up to a lack of cases with congenial fact patterns. To the contrary, Cardi and co-authors identify numerous cases involving facts where the application of the continuing-risk rule would have given rise to a clear-cut defendant-side duty. Yet, in many of these cases, even while the duty question was exhaustively debated, the rule was never so much as mentioned.
So, Cardi and co-authors ask: Why has the continuing-risk rule continually fallen under the radar?
One potential culprit is simple ignorance. Judges and lawyers might not be aware of the rule—and this lack of awareness can create a negative feedback loop. “Courts fail to apply the rule, so attorneys fail to argue it, which in turn makes courts even less likely to apply it.” (P. 19.)
Or, it could be that judges and lawyers believe that the rule is too amorphous or open-ended, not realizing that, in fact, the Third Restatement’s version of the Rule (as explained above) contains clear and workable limits.
But, for current purposes, the why is much less important than the simple fact. The continuing-risk rule is a broadly accepted doctrine that elegantly addresses factual scenarios that at least sometimes arise. By shining a light on this long-overlooked doctrine, Cardi, Jenne, and Villarreal perform a valuable service, assisting both litigants and courts.
May 23, 2025 Sarah Swan
Deborah N. Archer & Joseph Schottenfeld,
Defending Home: Toward a Theory of Community Equity, __
U. Chi. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2025), available at
SSRN (Sept. 30, 2024).
For communities suffering the harms of long-standing neglect and callous infrastructure decisions that dump highways, landfills, and the like in the middle of them, legal remedies have been few and far between. In their illuminating article, Defending Home: Toward a Theory of Community Equity, Deborah Archer and Joseph R. Schottenfeld offer a new framework to render such community-based harms legally cognizable, and call on tort law as an important conceptual piece of this project.
Archer and Schottenfeld begin by telling the story of Sandridge, a small, unincorporated, historically Black community in South Carolina. When the surrounding county decided it was time for a new four-lane road project to connect two pre-existing highways and make it easier for vacationers to travel to the beach, numerous road placement options were proposed. The county determined that the best path forward would be to lay the highway down right in the middle of Sandridge, even though the road would functionally destroy the community, devouring multiple homes, businesses, and the community park, and isolating the heart and soul of the community, the church, from its many attendees.
This, unfortunately, is an all-too-familiar local government story. As Archer and Schottenfeld describe, the burdens of infrastructure and industry often “fall disproportionately on Black communities that rarely receive the full benefits of these investments.” From Louisiana’s infamous cancer alley, to the raw sewage seeping into the homes of residents of Centreville, Illinois, many majority-Black communities across the nation are chronically neglected by their state and local governments and left to bear the heavy burdens of infrastructure changes, with little recourse for the damage done.
Archer and Schottenfeld argue that law can and should do more to remedy these harms. First, they articulate and clarify that the harm at issue in these scenarios is distinctively community-based. It is not just about loss and damage on an individual level, but on a collective one: there is a “loss of access to shared community assets, both formal and informal, as occurs when its members are no longer able to enjoy the home and community they built together.”
Here, the article helpfully resonates with the burgeoning scholarship on place-making. In recent work, scholars have been exploring how the everyday acts of dwelling in a place and cultivating a social and collective life within it give meaning to places and transform them into communities. These scholars argue that such efforts should receive more recognition when it comes to place governance, and are exploring new, inclusive governance mechanisms and techniques that could provide more meaningful decision-making processes to communities like Sandridge when new highways need development.
In the meantime, though, the people who once called Sandridge home had little say in the infrastructure decision that eventually decimated it and are left with few options once the damage is done. Archer and Schottenfeld meticulously survey the menu of potential legal remedies, surfacing the awkward fit between existing legal frameworks and the collective, community-based harm that has occurred. Existing legal frameworks, as Archer and Schottenfeld describe, poorly account for harms to collectivities and for a loss of community: most align with only individual rights-based conceptions of injury, which fail to capture the nature and totality of the loss. The compensation offered through takings law, for instance, does not encompass the value of the loss of the community, and rarely applies to those who remain in their property but have now lost the social connections that once flourished there.
Archer and Schottenfeld propose a new “community equity framework” that would “recognize the weight and worth of community as an asset deserving respect and legal protection.” In their words, this framework “recognizes the collective investments that community residents make over time to build a sense of security, well-being, and belonging; addresses the harms that accrue to the community from improvident public works projects and neglect;” “advances the equitable distribution of benefits and harms across communities;” and “provides a platform for collective action to defend community interests.”
To develop this framework, Archer and Schottenfeld draw on one of the few existing legal arenas where community rights have been acknowledged: the tort of public nuisance. Public nuisance law goes beyond the typical individualized assessment of harm that tends to dominate modes of legal redress, and recognizes harms experienced by a collective public. Specifically, public nuisance has traditionally offered compensation for unreasonable interferences with public health, safety, morals, peace, comfort or convenience. Public nuisance law, then, demonstrates that law can “recognize public rights and public benefits,” and community deprivation of a collective resource can constitute a legal wrong.
In fact, as Archer and Schottenfeld explain, public nuisance has previously been used in ways that resemble the framework they are proposing. Black survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, for example, notably sued the city of Tulsa and the county in public nuisance. But as is all-too often the case when plaintiffs encourage a robust and flexible application of public nuisance, that suit was ultimately unsuccessful, and Archer and Schottenfeld are careful to not overdraw the comparison. Their point is less that public nuisance will be a successful path for these communities and more that the conceptual underpinnings of public nuisance, with its roots in a community-based harm, suggest a realistic anchoring point for the novel community-based framework they are advancing.
The move to public nuisance law here is an adroit one, and there may be additional strands in public nuisance law and scholarship that further support their argument and framework. As one example, a recent wave of public nuisance lawsuits brought by microlocal entities like school districts and tiny towns emphasizes collective harms to discrete publics and communities. Additionally, a line of law and economics scholarship arguing that community is in fact a “special kind of asset” which should be explicitly factored into judicial assessments of loss and value in contexts like public nuisance also accords with this new community equity framework. Some local government zoning cases, too, at least implicitly recognize a claim to maintaining a particular type of community (though it is typically white, suburban neighborhoods that tend to receive such protections).
Ultimately, communities like Sandridge face an uphill battle in their fight for community-based rights and a more equitable distribution of public burdens and benefits. But the community equity framework that Archer and Schottenfeld offer, rooted in the conception of community-based harm already present in public nuisance law, serves as a viable starting point from which to begin this necessary work.
Apr 24, 2025 Anthony Sebok
Recent events offer a grim picture of the future of public law. In particular, President Trump’s assault on the administrative state seems destined to hamper the ability of agencies to protect the public in familiar areas such as drug safety, auto safety, environmental protection, and consumer protection.
It is for this reason that a recent paper by Yotam Kaplan, Adi Libson, and Gideon Parchomovsky, entitled The Renaissance of Private Law, is especially timely. Their thesis is that private law can partially substitute for some of the functions performed by public law, namely the regulation, supervision, and sanctioning of private actors—especially large corporations which typically escape control by the state, and, even when they do not, ignore civil fines and penalties.
Kaplan, Libson, and Parchomovsky (“KLP”) begin their article at a familiar place. They observe that public law, for a variety of reasons, is less effective than ever before in handling serious public risks. They do not begin with a list of failures, perhaps because these are so obvious, but throughout the article they mention various examples of private sector activity left unchecked by regulators: the opioid epidemic, gun violence, electronic cigarettes (P. 4), climate change (P. 19), the rise of cryptocurrency and AI (P. 32), and social media’s production of disinformation (P. 34).
KLP identify multiple forces—some familiar and some new—that prevent public law, in America at least, from addressing activities posing risks of large-scale harm: (1) Government legal action is sometimes hard to initiate, not because the state lacks resources, but because it lacks the will to challenge and annoy powerful constituents (P. 9). (2) Decisionmakers in government are relatively easy for powerful constituents to access and influence (P. 13), in part (3) because these powerful constituents themselves were once regulators or the regulators hope for employment in the private sector (P. 15). (4) Specialization leads to myopia (P. 16), and (5) centralization leads to vulnerability to focused attacks by highly motivated private sector actors. (6) Although the state has fearsome investigative powers, it can miss important information that is held by private actors who are not motivated to volunteer it (P. 19). (7) In contrast to private law, regulation requires a large ex ante investment (P. 21). (8) The Constitution of the United States may specifically restrict the power of public law to interfere with risky behavior in the marketplace (P. 29). KLP illustrate this point by noting that the Second Amendment has hamstrung public law efforts to address gun violence.
In contrast, KLP claim that private law has proven nimble where public law has been weak and ineffective. Private law is, well, private, and so it is not vulnerable to pressures from powerful constituents, or lobbying efforts, or the allure of the revolving door. Similarly, KLP make a virtue of decentralization, which is a hallmark of private law practice. They argue that focused attacks are less likely to paralyze the plaintiffs’ bar, and that its networked nature increases the likelihood that useful information can be cheaply accessed from a variety of far-flung sources.
KLP argue that two key changes have recently occurred that provide private law with a distinct advantage over public law. First, compared to the past, there is a “proliferation of information” that alters the balance of power between public and private law. Second, several successive administrations, in conjunction with important Supreme Court rulings and political polarization, have significantly rolled back the regulatory state. In other words, compared to the situation decades ago, private law in 2025 looks good by comparison to public law.
The article is guardedly optimistic. It suggests that there are some green shoots of life in the garden of the public interest, but they are growing in an unexpected place—tort law. Given the consensus that tort reformers triumphed in the last few decades in significantly limiting tort liability, the article gets its impact from making the following counterintuitive claim: tort reform in the 1980’s and ’90s did not finish off the plaintiffs’ bar, and in fact, if anything, the plaintiffs’ bar has come roaring back.
My main concern about KLP’s article is what it does not acknowledge: that the putative “renaissance” of private law has only come about through a rearrangement of private law. KLP report, but do not reflect, on the fact that almost all of the private law campaigns they put forward as a substitute for public law involve a very unusual type of private law claim, namely public nuisance claims brought by state and municipal plaintiffs, often with the assistance of plaintiffs’ attorneys working on a contingent fee.
While every private law cause of action is distinctive, public nuisance is very different from the rest of tort law in significant ways. First of all, the wrong alleged is suffered not by a private plaintiff, but by a legal fiction dubbed “the public.” Second, the wrong is not the interference with an interest recognized anywhere else as a protected interest in private law, such as bodily integrity, chattel, land, economic interest, emotional tranquility, or reputation. Rather, it is an interference with something called “public right.” Third, and finally, the remedy is technically not damages (either compensatory or punitive) but an injunction or compensation to offset the costs of abating the nuisance.
Even if public nuisance can secure, through its remedies, the same outputs that public law once could (but now fails to) produce, it will do so only by reproducing many of the same features of public law that led to the dire situation in which we now find ourselves.
KLP frequently emphasize the role of the private plaintiff in private law. Private law, they observe, is directly accessible to “unorganized citizens in ways that critically distinguish it from regulation” (P. 13). Public nuisance suits may be many things, but they are not the product of “unorganized citizens.” In response to mass harms, they are almost always brought by public actors.
To be sure, the decision-making process that leads to a state or municipality filing a public nuisance lawsuit is different from the decision-making process that leads to a regulator issuing a regulation or even filing a lawsuit to enforce a regulation. But the proximity of both types of legal action to the state as the focal point of the litigation should put us on notice that public nuisance may have more in common with public law than with private law. And that only leads to more fundamental questions, such as, why aren’t the public-law actors who bring public nuisance suits subject to the same disadvantages so powerfully illustrated by KLP in the first part of their article.
KLP might respond that public nuisance litigation shares two important features with classical private law litigation. First, the standards of conduct to which the litigants (whoever they are) seek to hold businesses depend ultimately on the legal judgment of judges, and not on the policy choices of political actors, such as regulators and legislators. Second, the litigants are not only the public law actors in whose name the lawsuits are brought, but also the professional private sector lawyers who develop the legal theories upon which the suits are brought and who fund the lawsuits.
As to the first point, it is true that KLP assert that adjudication is different from regulation because it is addressed to “generalist courts” (P. 17) staffed by personnel “insulated” from the influence of business interests (P. 15). This view of judges as engaged in the principled elaboration of common law doctrine is attractive, but it feels slightly anachronistic in light of the political polarization KLP describe later in the article (Pp. 37-38).
The second point is valid as a descriptive matter, but I think it leaves open more questions than it answers. It is true that the lawyers who brought the major public nuisance lawsuits celebrated by KLP are state actors who are not captured by the business interests that KLP fear have captured other state actors. But they are not the party-in-interest, either. Plaintiffs’ lawyers who promote the ends of plaintiffs are agents of parties-in-interest, whether those parties be injured individuals, class members, or a governmental unit. Can we be sure that these agents, in their pursuit of the ends of their clients, will always pursue the public interest? After all, the argument in the article was not simply that private law is capable of incentivizing lawyers to bring lawsuits. That point needs no proof. The argument is that new forms of private law have emerged which have the effect of producing the same public goods as regulation, and that in a time of regulatory failure, these new forms of private law should be embraced and celebrated.
KLP have produced a very rich article that deserves careful attention. Their argument—that there are green shoots of private law in the midst of public law’s winter of retreat—is both hopeful and intriguing. Time will tell as to whether they are correct.
Mar 27, 2025 John C.P. Goldberg
Matteo Godi,
Section 1983: A Strict Liability Statutory Tort, 113
Cal. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2025), available at
SSRN (Aug. 13, 2024).
The federal civil rights law known as 42 U.S.C. § 1983 has garnered vast attention from the legal academy, including recent wide-ranging discussions of its qualified immunity defense. In his interesting article, Section 1983: A Strict Liability Statutory Tort, Matteo Godi addresses a more basic question, namely: what are the elements of a Section 1983 claim? Intriguingly, he maintains that the statute is best interpreted to hold officials strictly liable.
Section 1983 empowers individuals to seek redress from state officials (and certain others) for violating their federal constitutional rights. Under prevailing Supreme Court precedent, the statute does not specify a uniform liability standard. Instead, different standards apply depending on the right allegedly violated. For example, to prove an Equal Protection violation, the plaintiff must demonstrate intentional discrimination. Meanwhile, an inmate alleging an Eighth Amendment violation might have to prove maliciousness (for claims of excessive force) or deliberate indifference (for claims of unsafe conditions of confinement). Notably, in all applications the statute is understood to require conduct falling below some standard of conduct, i.e., legal fault.
According to Godi, this reading of the statute is fundamentally mistaken. As a matter of sound interpretation and normative theory, he claims, Section 1983 should be read to impose a single rule of strict liability. Thus, on his account, an inmate denied adequate medical treatment should be able to establish a constitutional tort simply by proving harm attributable to the denial, irrespective of whether the harm was intentionally or carelessly inflicted.
In its interpretive dimension, Godi’s argument relies primarily on a textualist analysis of Section’s 1983 legislative progenitor, the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (“CRA”), as well as its 1874 successor, known as “Section 1979.” In relevant part, the CRA stated:
any person who, under color of any law … of any State, shall subject … any person … to the deprivation of any rights … secured by the Constitution of the United States, shall … be liable to the party injured in any action at law….
Section 1979 similarly allows for the imposition of liability on all persons who under color of law cause a U.S. citizen to be subjected to “the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution…” According to Godi, the unqualified phrases “deprivation of any rights,” and “shall … be liable” specify a rule of strict liability. This textual analysis is then bolstered by, among other things, some nineteenth-century lower-court decisions rejecting defendants’ efforts to establish that liability under Section 1979 required proof of malicious conduct.
After recounting how, starting in the 1940s, the Supreme Court interposed various fault requirements onto Section 1983, the article concludes with a discussion of tort theory that aims to explain why a strict liability reading of Section 1983 is normatively plausible. Here, Godi maintains that it would make sense to employ strict liability as an antidote to the rash of civil rights violations perpetrated by state actors, particularly in former confederate states. This in turn suggests to him that Section 1983 should not be understood as embodying a private-law (interpersonal-wrong-based) approach to tort law, but instead as adopting a public-law model of tort as law that empowers citizens to act as private attorneys general.
Godi’s paper invites welcome reconsideration of the liability standard(s) set by Section 1983. It also elegantly weaves together history, doctrine, and theory to offer a coherent account of that standard.
In my view, some of the evidence offered for his thesis is less persuasive than he supposes. For example, one of the main nineteenth-century cases on which he relies rejected the defendants’ contention that liability under Section 1979 required proof of “willfulness” or “maliciousness” in denying Black citizens the right to vote. Godi interprets the defendants’ contention as an argument against liability “unless [they] were culpable or at fault in some way.” (P. 24.) In turn, he treats the court’s rejection of this argument as an embrace of strict liability. Yet this is not the most plausible reading of the defendants’ contention or the court’s rejection of it.
Willfulness and maliciousness are special forms of culpability; plenty of conduct that involves neither is still wrongful. By the same token, the court’s opinion nowhere states or implies that liability would attach for an entirely faultless interference with the right to vote. Indeed, the ‘deprivation’ in the case itself appears to have been intentional even if not malicious (in the sense of inspired by racial animus): the officials in question purposely refused to register the plaintiff voters.
In short, the court’s willingness to hold these officials liable by no means establishes that it would also have imposed strict liability. Imagine an election official who, despite using due care in storing the ballots in his custody, failed to prevent them from being ruined by an unpreventable water leak, such that voters in his district, including Black voters, could not vote. Liability?
Meanwhile, Godi’s textualist analysis proceeds on a not-fully-defended assumption: namely, that, the phrase “deprivation of any right” necessarily contemplates liability without regard to the nature of the conduct that interfered with the right. Implicit in this analysis is a ‘monadic’ conception of the legal rights protected by Section 1983—one that is sometimes referenced in phrases like “the right to bodily integrity.” In such usage, the right to bodily integrity is understood as the interest each person has in physical intactness, an interest that is interfered with whenever a person experiences physical harm, regardless of how the harm comes about.
The problem is that, in tort law and related fields, references to “rights” are typically not references to monadically defined interests but instead to one side of a ‘dyadically’ defined right-duty pairing. Consider battery and negligence. Battery recognizes a legal a right against being intentionally touched by another in a harmful or offensive manner, along with a corresponding duty not to touch others in that way. Negligence recognizes a right not to be physically harmed by the careless actions of another, along with a corresponding duty not to so harm others. These dyadically defined legal rights may well protect each person’s interest in bodily integrity, monadically defined. They nonetheless clearly stand apart from that interest because, by definition, they cannot be violated except through conduct that falls below a legal standard (e.g. conduct that is careless). If, as Godi suggests, Section 1983 should be understood as instantiating core tort principles, then—in keeping with the structure of other torts—it should be read to create legal wrongs that consist of one person suffering a certain kind of setback as a result of another person’s sub-standard conduct.
Of course, “strict liability” can mean different things, and there are other senses of this phrase that would also push against what many, including Godi, consider to be unduly stingy readings of the statute, including those favored by the current Supreme Court. Indeed, the predominant form of strict liability in tort law is not liability irrespective of the violation of a standard of conduct, but liability based on the violation of demanding or unforgiving (“strict”) standards. Tort law frequently imposes liability absent significant blameworthiness or culpability—for example in cases where the defendant acted with no intention to harm or no subjective appreciation of committing a rights-violation.
The foregoing observation, combined with Godi’s sound insistence that Section 1983 is statutory tort, lends support to the idea that it imposes strict liability in this alternative sense—i.e., requires wrongful conduct (contra Godi), yet does not recognize excuses that apply in other domains, such as criminal law. So construed, his analysis adds an important dimension to critiques of the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity doctrine, which is predicated in part on a misplaced concern to ensure that only highly culpable actors (those who violate “clearly established” rights) are subject to liability.
A final note on tort theory. Godi argues that his reading of the CRA gibes with that law’s being understood as adopting a public-law conception of tort law. His thought seems to be that a strict liability reading of the CRA follows naturally from the idea that the statute has always been meant to deter rights violations instead of ‘merely’ providing after-the-fact compensation.
As longstanding debates among legal economists have demonstrated, a focus on deterrence hardly entails a commitment to strict liability. In any event, Godi’s reading of the CRA as a private-attorney-general-statute rests on an oversimplified picture of the tort theory landscape, according to which private-law tort theories are equated with compensation-driven accounts of tort law, whereas public-law tort theories focus on deterrence.
In fact, the dominant understanding of tort law at the time the CRA was enacted conceived of it as law for the redress of private wrongs. On this understanding, tort law identifies and condemns as wrongful (and therefore not-to-be-done) certain kinds of interpersonal interactions. These norms or legal directives identify genuine, conduct-guiding obligations, not merely preconditions for a compensatory payment. Given this background, it seems more plausible that the CRA was not understood as a strict liability, private-attorney-general statute, but instead as a law setting standards of right and wrong conduct for the twin purposes of discouraging such conduct and providing persons victimized by such conduct redress against their victimizers.
A Strict Liability Statutory Tort offers much food for thought about constitutional tort law and tort law generally. Regardless of whether one agrees with its conclusions, it reminds us that the “tort” side of constitutional tort law has been unduly neglected and needs careful attention if this foundational civil rights law is to be applied in a manner consistent with its origins and aspirations.
