Tort Wars

Tort Wars tracks the range of social conflicts, analyzing the adequacy of law's tools and standards.

Joel Levin (Author)

9780521897037, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 April 2008

260 pages
23.4 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.53 kg

“Joel Levin's Tort Wars is a well written and fun read through the recent tort wars. Referencing legal cases and the legal philosophy literature, he proposes a pluralistic, political approach to ending the contentious tort debate. Peace will come to this area of conflict, he argues, when advocates cease being quite so doctrinaire in their views. Practitioners and theorists alike will enjoy and be challenged by his presentation.”
--Carl Cranor, University of California, Riverside, Author of Toxic Torts: Science Law, and the Possibility of Justice

Tort Wars brings together the diverse and usually insufficiently related strands of tort law and treats the moral, economic, and systemic problems running through those strands with a single analysis and theory. In that tort law employs theory at all, it is typically theory measured against notions of corrective justice or appeals to utility. Both have severe prescriptive restrictions and limited explanatory power and often stray from any useful description of tort cases in the courts. Tort Wars looks at the nature of dispute resolution techniques, criticizes the blasé justice and more esoteric utility theory, and examines the problems of both the legal academy and the veracity vacuum in the courtroom. Further, it explores the conceptual differences between tort and contract, locating contract as a subset of tort. It uses examples drawn from the edges of tort law in an attempt to measure central cases by the marginal ones and to provide a barometer of emerging legal and social change, achieved through imposing an individualized peace.

1. Digesting torts: an explanation
2. Discovering tort law
3. Schoolyard spats
4. Fighting words
5. Tort encounters contract
6. War without the war
7. Once and future battlefields.

Subject Areas: Torts / Delicts [LNV], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB]