Category Archives: Torts

Torts That Heal Words That Wound

Sep 27, 2021 Cristina TilleyTorts

Cristina Tilley

Among legal academics, the intentional infliction of emotional distress tort is having a moment. Long derided as the “redheaded stepchild”¹ of personal injury law, IIED is being rediscovered by scholars seeking new interventions against social ills like workplace oppression and ethnoviolence.² Tasnim Motala is the latest writer to explore the promise of the IIED tort, this time as a response to racist speech. In Words Still Wound: IIED & Evolving Attitudes toward Racist Speech, Motala makes three crucial moves: she concretizes the injury of racial insult; she documents the limits of legislative efforts to stigmatize and deter this speech; and she revisits the intellectual history of the tort to suggest its capacity to redress speech-inflicted wounds. Some of these moves work better than others, but in the end, Motala has advanced an important conversation about private law’s power to change social norms.

From its inception in the early twentieth century, lawyers and judges have been suspicious about IIED, often because they have resisted the idea that emotional injuries are sufficiently “real” to merit the law’s protection. This suspicion has been especially intense where the claimed injury arises from a defendant’s use of the legal right and cultural privilege to express personal opinions. Motala meets this objection head-on, showing how racial epithets rupture both the individual and society. She draws on extensive interdisciplinary literature showing that racial insults in person-to-person encounters inflict harms so widely recognized that psychologists have medicalized them as “race-based trauma.” (P. 123.) This trauma has been empirically demonstrated to cause “anxiety, hypervigilance to threat, [and] lack of hopefulness for [the] future,” often leading to depression and substance abuse. (P. 123-24.) Leveraging tort’s simultaneous concern with private rights and social concerns, Motala argues that when these injuries are unredressed, they corrode both individual well-being and the social trust on which economic and democratic structures rely. (P. 120, 123.) Notably, Motala does not try to placate critics who insist that only physiological injury counts for tort liability. She subtly rejects the terms on which these critics want to joust, instead urging readers that tort’s concerns go beyond the tangible alone. Continue reading "Torts That Heal Words That Wound"

Law’s Arithmetic

Aug 11, 2021 Ronen AvrahamTorts

Ronen Avraham

My favorite type of paper is the type where you hit your forehead asking yourself: how did I miss this simple point? How did everyone else miss it? Why didn’t I write this paper myself, given that its main insight was under my nose for so many years? In Sequencing in Damages, Edward Cheng, Ehud Guttel and Yuval Procaccia (hereinafter: CGP) made me hit my forehead. The paper is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, and deservedly so.

CGP’s paper is about law’s arithmetic. It is a well-known stereotype that students go to law school because they cannot stand math. Perhaps this is why lawyers, judges and law professors seem to fail in applying what looks like really simple math.

Consider the following elementary school exercise:

(1,200,000-400,000)* ½ = 1,200,000 * ½ -400,000

True or False? Continue reading "Law’s Arithmetic"

A New Retributive Justification for Punitive Damages

Jul 13, 2021 Kenneth W. SimonsTorts

Kenneth W. Simons

Most American states permit the award of extra-compensatory punitive damages to tort plaintiffs if the defendant’s conduct was especially culpable. The conventional rationales for this practice are the value of punishing such conduct and the special need to deter it. Yet these rationales are focused entirely on the defendant: they explain why a defendant should pay more than compensatory damages but do not explain why that additional punitive award should be transferred to the plaintiff. And indeed, many states, under “split recovery” schemes, require that a specified proportion of a punitive damage award be paid to the state, not to the plaintiff. But critics of punitive damage awards are not satisfied by this response: they believe that transferring any nontrivial¹ portion of a large punitive damage award to a plaintiff gives that plaintiff an unjust and undeserved “windfall.”

Can the practice of awarding substantial punitive damages to plaintiffs be justified? The literature on the propriety of punitive damages in tort law is enormous, but that literature has paid little attention to the “windfall” objection. The objection is not especially troubling to consequentialist or law and economics scholars: punitive damage awards help incentivize plaintiffs’ lawyers to fully investigate serious wrongdoing and may offer useful additional deterrence of especially culpable conduct. But corrective justice and civil recourse theories cannot so readily overcome the windfall objection, insofar as they emphasize the close bipolar relationship between defendant’s wrong and plaintiff’s injury, and between defendant’s duty to pay damages and plaintiff’s right to receive those damages. Continue reading "A New Retributive Justification for Punitive Damages"

Leaving the Horse and Buggy Days of Limited Recovery for Economic Loss

Jun 21, 2021 Ellen BublickTorts

Ellen Bublick

More than a hundred years ago, in Mitchell v. Rochester Railway Co., 151 N.Y. 107, 108 (1896), New York’s highest Court denied recovery to a plaintiff who had being negligently charged by a team of horses. Although the plaintiff was rendered unconscious and suffered a miscarriage, the Court held that she could not recover for “mere fright.” The court excluded recovery even though the team of horses “came so close to the plaintiff that she stood between the horses’ heads when they were stopped.” (P. 108.) The court reasoned: cases had not historically allowed recovery for fright or shock; if recovery were established “it would naturally result in a flood of litigation… a wide field would be opened for fictitious or speculative claims”; and “damages were too remote.” Today, notwithstanding these historical worries, most authorities would permit recovery on the Mitchell line of facts.

In her important article, Public Nuisance as a Modern Business Tort: A New Unified Framework for Liability for Economic Harms, Professor Cathy Sharkey invites readers to question whether nonliability for economic loss, and courts’ similar rationales, should also go the way of horse and buggy. Sharkey suggests “the calculus may be shifting in an age of global financial crises, escalation of digital and informational harms, and growing sense that societal harms of the 21^st century involve risky conduct leading to purely financial harms.” (P. 3.) In particular, Sharkey focuses her attention on the public nuisance tort. Are authorities right to specifically permit liability in public nuisance cases while generally limiting liability for negligently caused economic loss? Are they right to focus on liability limitation as their exclusive policy concern in both the public nuisance and economic loss space? Continue reading "Leaving the Horse and Buggy Days of Limited Recovery for Economic Loss"

Kantian Justice and Aggregate Welfare

May 13, 2021 Sandy SteelTorts

Sandy Steel

Is it permissible to take into account considerations of aggregate welfare, distributive justice, and others which concern the impact of the law on society as a whole in setting the content of private law rules? Certain Kantian theories—notably, Arthur Ripstein’s—seem to answer ‘no’: the only normative business of private law should be the realization of our innate right to freedom as independence.¹ Benbaji’s article, Welfare and Freedom: Towards a Semi-Kantian Theory of Private Law, seeks to show that a superior Kantian theory should answer ‘yes’, but only in so far as a legislator is choosing between private law systems which equally realize our innate right to freedom. In his view, the Kantian state’s duty to realize a private law that secures freedom has strict lexical priority over other non-freedom-related considerations.

Consider a toy example to illustrate Benbaji’s basic idea. Suppose there are two different, inconsistent, schemes of private law rights in relation to unreasonable risk imposition, P1, and P2, which equally realize freedom as independence. According to Benbaji, it would be permissible for the Kantian legislator to choose between P1 and P2 on the ground that P2 maximises aggregate welfare. If, however, P1 realized freedom as independence but P2 fell short of realizing freedom as independence, then the Kantian legislature would be duty-bound to establish P1, even if P2 scored much higher on welfarist grounds. Benbaji calls his view ‘semi-Kantian’, then, because it accords lexical priority to Kantian freedom, but departs from Ripstein’s Kantian ‘minimalism’ in permitting non-freedom-based considerations to determine the content of private law entitlements once that lexical threshold is met. Continue reading "Kantian Justice and Aggregate Welfare"

Filling the Gaps in IIED

Apr 14, 2021 Christopher J. RobinetteTorts

Christopher J. Robinette

The intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED) is, in some ways, an outlier among the intentional torts. Most intentional torts are ancient, dating back centuries. By contrast, the original Restatement of Torts, published in the 1930s, did not recognize IIED; it first appeared in a supplement in 1948. More importantly, the intentional torts tend to focus on delineated forbidden conduct. The gist of battery is contact; of assault, it is apprehension; of false imprisonment, it is confinement. IIED is broader, vaguer than the other intentional torts. Although vagueness has the advantage of flexibility, it creates significant difficulties in application.

Alex Long’s recent article, Using the IIED Tort to Address Discrimination and Retaliation in the Workplace, provides concrete guidance on a specific and important fact pattern.

In spite of Title VII and other antidiscrimination statutes, discrimination and harassment in the workplace remain a problem. Long wants to use tort law to help. Mindful of courts’ reluctance to use the tort of IIED in the employment context, Long singles out a limited set of circumstances for liability. He argues that “courts should recognize retaliatory conduct as an especially weighty factor in deciding whether conduct is extreme and outrageous for purposes of IIED claims, particularly where it is coupled with discriminatory conduct.” (P. 4.) Long’s reasoning is partially instrumental; deterring retaliation would arguably incentivize people to complain about and, thus, reduce harassment. He focuses primarily, however, on the harm to the victim, using social science research to support his argument. Continue reading "Filling the Gaps in IIED"

Vetting Voir Dire

Mar 12, 2021 Nora Freeman EngstromTorts

Nora Freeman Engstrom

An Empirical Examination of Civil Voir Dire: Implications for Meeting Constitutional Guarantees and Suggested Best Practices is a provocative new paper by an all-star cast of empirical legal scholars, including John Campbell, Jessica Salerno, Hannah Phalen, Samantha Bean, Valerie Hans, Less Ross, and Daphna Spivack. In the paper, the authors start with a set of key questions: “[I]f a fair jury is the real goal, how do we ensure we have one? Which jurors should be seated, and which excluded? And how do we achieve the goal of finding the biases that pervert the jury system?” (P. 2-3).

In tackling these key questions, the authors recognize that juries sit in the center of our civil justice system; the decisions they make cast shadows that affect myriad claims. And voir dire (the process whereby questions are asked of the venire panel to identify the prospective jurors who will be excluded by peremptory challenges or for cause) is the filter that determines which individuals serve on juries and which do not. Yet, despite the process’s importance and centrality, we know remarkably little about how voir dire is conducted in the United States and how good it is at achieving its stated aims. The authors’ much-needed investigation starts to answer both questions—and, as I explain below, might also have implications far beyond the paper’s four corners. Continue reading "Vetting Voir Dire"

Three Deft Kicks to the Problem of Cyberbullying

Feb 15, 2021 Anita BernsteinTorts

Anita Bernstein

Torts-minded readers with an under-18 person or two they care about in their lives will appreciate Civil Liability for Cyberbullying (“Cyberbullying”), published in June by the Israeli private law scholar Ronen Perry. They will find ample theory, doctrine, erudition, and intellectual loft too, but this paper is peopled. In both his article and a blog post he wrote about it Perry leads by remembering a person: Megan Meier, who at age 13 heeded a suggestion posted on MySpace in 2006 that she kill herself.

From this opening Perry moves to spend most of his time on three groups whom the law could hold responsible for the harms of cyberbullying. First are young peer offenders. (P. 1226.) Next come what Perry calls “real-life supervisors” (P. 1235): parents, teachers, school administrators. Last are “virtual supervisors, namely platforms that enable juvenile cyber-activity and cyber-wrongdoing,” for example Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (P. 1245.) Perry has tort liability plans for all these groups. His exposition contains many virtues, of which I will mention three. Continue reading "Three Deft Kicks to the Problem of Cyberbullying"

Beware of Strangers Bearing Gifts

Jan 14, 2021 Anthony SebokTorts

Anthony Sebok

A familiar rhetorical trope in modern advocacy is: “Imagine if visitors from outer space were observing x; how would they describe it?” The payoff of this exercise is to get the audience to see that the view proposed by the speaker, while superficially unfamiliar, is actually more perceptive than the conventional understanding of the practice at issue. The subtext is that only with the benefit of insights gleaned from a great distance (or an unusual perspective) can those immersed in a practice truly understand it.

I could not help but think of this trope while reading Knobe and Shapiro’s fascinating—if at times frustrating—paper on proximate cause. Of course, they are not space aliens; they are both philosophers and one (Shapiro) is a law professor as well. But neither specializes in tort law, and by their own admission they are leveraging their distance from the conventional discourse of torts scholars and judges to arrive at insights that have otherwise eluded those of us immersed in the practice. Continue reading "Beware of Strangers Bearing Gifts"