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.
• No other such book covers tort in the same fashion; comparable titles are mostly compilations of essays and analyses. • Includes explanatory power of the American legal system, which other essays lack • Attempts to analyze and justify tort in a systematic way
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.