Torts: Cases, Problems, and Policy Choices

This casebook offers a sustained examination of private law remedies for harms arising from both intentional and accidental conduct. It explores the legal institutions, doctrines, and judgments through which courts and legislatures allocate responsibility when one person’s conduct injures another. At its center is a basic but enduring question: when, and on what terms, may one private citizen compel another to provide monetary redress? Tort litigation turns on a complex interplay of doctrine, theory, and policy: the elements a plaintiff must prove, the principles that justify liability, and the considerations that shape the scope of recovery. This casebook examines each of these dimensions through the cases, controversies, and recurring problems that have defined the law of torts. Alongside foundational decisions, readers will encounter the occasional anachronism, doctrinal oddity, and legal relic. Some rules have fallen out of favor. Others are making a comeback. The quirkiness of tort law is not confined to doctrine. Its facts often form a parade of the improbable: shoppers slipping on rogue pizza slices in a Target aisle, municipalities sued over monkeys escaping from understaffed zoos, and countless other accidents in which ordinary life turns unexpectedly litigious. Yet beneath these eccentric settings lie some of the law’s most serious questions: how to determine causation, when to recognize a duty of care, and how far responsibility should extend in everyday life.