Abstract

The American Law Institute’s Third Restatement of Torts was initially conceived as a series of separate projects, each with its own reporters. From 1998 through 2010, the ALI completed and published three different segments: Products Liability, Apportionment of Liability, and Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm. Initially, the ALI did not intend to restate the intentional torts, believing that the Second Restatement’s treatment of these torts was clear and largely authoritative. It was ultimately persuaded that there were numerous unresolved issues that needed to be addressed. As a result, it authorized a new project on Intentional Torts–a project that is currently ongoing. Rather than applaud or critique the specific choice the reporters are making, I have chosen to discuss two broader concerns regarding the project. The first concern is that the piecemeal nature of assembling all the separate projects of the Third Restatement of Torts (including the review and adoption of different sections within Intentional Torts) has made the Intentional Torts reporters’ task more difficult than it should have been and may contribute to an overall product that is flawed in important respects, primarily because of inconsistencies that cannot easily be corrected. The second concern is that the Intentional Torts reporters have too often lost sight of the conceptual distinctions between intentional and nonintentional torts. Although I agree that these conceptual distinctions should not have driven the basic organization of the project, as was once suggested, I argue that the reporters are making doctrinal decisions that further blur, rather than clarify, the boundaries between the intentional torts and other torts, primarily negligence.

Abstract

The idea that criminal punishment carries a message of condemnation is as commonplace as could be. Indeed, many think that condemnation is the mark of punishment, distinguishing it from other sorts of penalties or burdens. But for all that torts and crimes share in common, nearly no one thinks that tort has similar expressive aims. And that is unfortunate, as the truth is that tort is very much an expressive institution, with messages to send that are different, but no less important, than those conveyed by the criminal law. In this essay, I argue that tort liability expresses the judgment that the defendant wronged the plaintiff. And I explain why it is important to have an institution that expresses that judgment. I argue that we need ways of treating wrongs as wrongs, so that we can vindicate the social standing of victims. Along the way, I consider the continuity between tort and revenge, and I suggest a new way of thinking about corrective justice and the role that tort plays in dispensing it. I conclude by sketching an agenda for tort reform that would improve tort’s ability to serve its expressive function.

Abstract

According to the most recent draft of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Intentional Torts to Persons, the intentional torts protect the rightholder’s interests differently from negligence-based rules and strict liability, placing them into a distinct substantive category. This conceptualization, however, does not provide courts with adequate guidance on how to formulate the element of intent. Different formulations can protect the rightholder’s interests differently from negligence and strict liability, so something else must determine the appropriate way to formulate the element of intent. The draft Restatement’s reasoning can be easily extended to provide a more useful conceptualization of the intentional torts. The practice of tort law involves the enforcement of behavioral norms, and so the substantive categories of tort law should correspond to normatively distinguishable categories of behavior. For tort purposes, three different paradigmatic forms of social behavior are relevant: aggressive interactions; interactions of mutual advantage; and the remaining nonaggressive, risk-creating interactions that are not motivated by an expectation of mutual benefit. Within this normative framework, the category of intentional torts is defined by aggressive interactions, which involve intentional harms that are normatively different from accidental harms. The intentional torts accordingly protect different interests in a distinctive manner as per the rationale in the draft Restatement. This normative framework straightforwardly explains a number of established rules while also resolving two questions of intent that have vexed courts and commentators. Difficult issues of intent involve hard questions about how the conduct is best categorized for tort purposes. Once the categories have been conceptualized in behavioral terms, the element of intent has a clear substantive purpose: it determines whether or not an interaction is aggressive and properly governed by the intentional torts.

Abstract

By furnishing new blackletter on battery, assault, and false imprisonment, Restatement (Third) of Torts: Intentional Torts to Persons provides illustrations of what the medieval writ of Trespass once remedied. All three causes of action restated in this Restatement derive from the trespass writ, as do other modern doctrines that fall under intentional torts to persons. This article, hewing to the tradition that the law of trespass provides redress for direct, unmediated, and wrongful boundary-crossing, argues that sexual penetration unwanted by the person penetrated is trespass. If rape is trespass, then consequences follow for the law of torts as well as crimes.

Abstract

This article offers a bold proposal: eliminate the intentional tort of battery and merge cases of both the negligent and intentional imposition of physical harm into a single new tort. The advantages of a single tort of wrongfully causing physical harm to persons are many. It would (a) do away with complex and unneeded doctrinal details now contained within battery law, (b) pave the way to a sensible regime of comparative fault for all such physical injuries, (c) properly shift the legal focus away from the plaintiff’s conduct and onto the defendant’s, (d) eliminate the Restatement’s need to supplement battery law with yet a separate intentional physical harm tort when an injury is intentionally caused but without the contact or other requirements of battery, and (e) force courts to decide various collateral issues (like whether punitive damages are available or whether liability insurance coverage is applicable) on their own terms and not by linking them to whether this case involves a battery (and then making exceptions, since it turns out that battery is not a reliable basis for deciding those collateral matters). More broadly, the new tort is intellectually more insightful as it anchors acts that now count as batteries more in their wrongfulness than in their intentionality as battery law does today.