tort

/tawrt/, n. Law.

a wrongful act, not including a breach of contract or trust, that results in injury to another's person, property, reputation, or the like, and for which the injured party is entitled to compensation.

[1350-1400; ME: injury, wrong < OF < ML tortum wrong, injustice, n. use of neut. of L tortus twisted, crooked, dubious, ptp. of torquere to twist, wring]

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Wrongful act, other than a breach of contract, that injures another and for which the law permits a civil (noncriminal) action to be brought.

Relief may be obtained in the form of damages or an injunction. The term derives from Latin tortum, meaning "something twisted, wrung, or crooked." Assault, defamation, malpractice, negligence, nuisance, product liability, property damage, and trespass are all (apart from their potentially criminal and contractual aspects) torts.

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▪ law

Introduction

      in common law, civil law, and the vast majority of legal systems that derive from them, any instance of harmful behaviour, such as physical attack on one's person, interference with one's possessions, or the use and enjoyment of one's land, economic interests (under certain conditions), honour, reputation, and privacy. The concept encompasses only those civil wrongs independent of contracts (contract).

      Other legal systems use different terminology for this wide and amorphous area of the law. Germans, for example, talk of unlawful acts, and French-inspired systems use interchangeably the terms délits (and quasi-délits) and extra-contractual civil responsibility. Despite differences of terminology, however, this area of the law is primarily concerned with liability for behaviour that the legal order regards as socially unacceptable, typically warranting the award of damages to the injured party or, occasionally, an injunction.

      It is broadly true to say that most western European and common-law systems tend to regard as actionable the same factual situations. But although the problems encountered are identical and the results reached are often quite similar, the arrangement of the law and the methodology employed often differ significantly between countries, depending on how the law has been conceived and how solutions have been approached in various cultures over time. Thus, the German Civil Code reflects a strong tendency to abstraction and systematization—qualities that betray the code's university and Roman-law origins and that contrast at least superficially with the more casuistic (case-based) and judge-made law of the common-law systems. By contrast, the 19th-century codifications, which are the products of the natural school of law (see natural law), are marked by their broad sweep and manifesto-like provisions, often making them more readable than their German counterparts but also less precise and accordingly in need of judicial definition. Typical of this approach is the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which became a model for most Romanistic legal systems, including those of Italy and Spain and their derivatives, mainly in Central and South America. Much of the contemporary law in these countries results from the interplay between judicial activity and doctrinal writing.

      Tort law, though often viewed as secondary to contract law in the law of civil obligations, spread to many parts of the world after World War II, and its influence was especially notable in continental Europe. At the same time, criticism of it has led to its replacement either partially by specialized schemes or, in rare cases, by complete systems of accident compensation. Criticism has also provoked serious discussion about the impact of the welfare state, modern insurance practices, and the importance of economic analysis in the proper development of the law. For a time it even looked as if these challenges might bring about wholesale reform (such as that adopted in New Zealand in the 1970s) that would threaten rules with very ancient pedigrees. But the 20th century closed with the tort system remaining basically intact, albeit held to a lower status within the entire system of compensation, as the majority of compensation for reparable injuries continued to be paid through social security systems and insurance claims.

Functions of tort

      Throughout its long history, tort has pursued different aims: punishment, appeasement, deterrence, compensation, and efficient loss spreading of the cost of accidents. None offers a complete justification; all are important, though at different stages one may have been more prominent than the rest.

punishment and appeasement

      Originally, tort and criminal law were indistinguishable, and, even when the two branches began to acquire independent identities, the former remained for a very long time in the shadow of the latter. Offenses against the community and the king's interests increasingly became the subject of criminal law, whereas wrongs against the individual came to be dealt with by the emerging (or, in the case of continental Europe, reemerging Roman-inspired) law of torts. Early tort law, however, was concerned only with the most serious kinds of wrongs—bodily injury, damage to goods, and trespass to land. Not until the 19th century was it extended to cover such conduct as intentional infliction of economic loss. In the 20th century the compensation of negligently inflicted economic loss and other violations of subtler interests (such as psychological injuries and violations of privacy) took centre stage in the wider debate that aimed to set the proper boundaries of tort liability.

      The emancipation of tort law from criminal law resulted from the need to buy off private vengeance and to strengthen law and order during the Middle Ages. Most authors would probably agree that punishment and appeasement are no longer major aims of tort law. Nevertheless, some common-law jurisdictions—notably the United States—retain in their damage (damages) awards a strong element of punishment for certain types of tortious conduct. These punitive or exemplary damages, as they are sometimes called, are in England limited to three rather narrow instances. The most troublesome and oft-encountered is the case of an activity calculated by the defendant to make a profit (a term not confined to moneymaking in the strict sense). In these instances it is felt that “it is necessary to teach the wrongdoer that tort does not pay” by making him not only compensate the plaintiff for the latter's loss but also disgorge any gain he may have made from his conduct. That this is right few would doubt. Less defensible, however, is the resulting windfall for the plaintiff and the loss of important procedural safeguards for the defendant in a situation in which “punishment” is meted out by unpredictable and unguided juries. In England the latter objection was partially countered by the courts' greater willingness, encouraged by modern statutory rules, to control such jury awards and to keep them within reasonable limits. But the same cannot be said of the United States, where punitive awards, often amounting to millions of dollars, had a significant effect on the tort strategies of litigants.

      Notwithstanding these doctrinal doubts, the award of punitive damages remains a possibility in some common-law countries, especially the United States. Favourable attitudes toward punitive awards may arise from a multitude of factors, such as a certain dislike for regulation as a means of influencing human conduct (e.g., to prevent accidents), the existence of contingent fees (see legal ethics), and the desire, more keenly felt by juries, to punish wealthy defendants. In the United States these and other factors deeply—yet indirectly—affect tort law in practice and account for some of the major differences from its progenitor, the English law of torts, with which the American progeny otherwise has much conceptual affinity. Civil-law systems have, by contrast, taken a hostile attitude toward penal damages in civil actions, though there are limited instances in the German law of tort (privacy) and the French law of contract (astreinte) in which a penal element has been allowed to creep into the civil award.

Deterrence

      In its modern, economic sense, deterrence aims at reducing the number of accidents by imposing a heavy financial cost on unsafe conduct. A distinction is necessary between specific and general deterrence. The former depends largely on the admonitory effect of tort law. This, however, is limited where insurance cushions the defendant from the economic consequences of an adverse judgment (though insurance premiums may subsequently be increased). This deterrent element, however, almost completely evaporates in the case of traffic accidents, where harm is statistically inevitable and in most cases results from momentary inattention, the occurrence of which no tort award can ever prevent. Tort law is, therefore, in some cases the second best means of preventing accidents after criminal law. Its greater (deterrent) influence may be in cases involving damage to property and tortious harm resulting from intentional activities.

      Very different was the theory of general deterrence principally argued by the U.S. legal scholar and judge Guido Calabresi in The Cost of Accidents (1970). In Calabresi's words, general deterrence involves deciding

what the accident costs of activities are and letting the market determine the degree to which, and the ways in which, activities are desired given such costs. Similarly it involves giving people freedom to choose whether they would rather engage in the activity and pay the costs of doing so, including accident costs, or, given the accident costs, engage in safer activities that might otherwise have seemed less desirable.

      Calabresi's approach reflected the belief that the market mechanism not only achieves the optimum allocation of resources but also ensures that most of society's decisions vis-à-vis accident-causing activities are left to the cumulative choice of individuals rather than to imposition by government.

      But is it possible to rely on the degree of rationality in human behaviour seemingly presupposed by economic theories? And is it always possible to identify the activity that causes the accident? For example, a tool defectively manufactured by A injures one of B's employees who has been supplied with it by B. Whose activity has caused this injury? And, in accidents involving automobiles and pedestrians, can such an economic choice be made? Calabresi treated the motorist as the best cost-avoider on the grounds that he has both better information and the means of reducing such accidents. But are such assumptions truly tenable? Finally, general deterrence so conceived cannot provide all the answers, as Calabresi was well aware. Wider considerations of fairness and justice also obtain, and it would be a mistake to assert that certain antisocial activities can and will be allowed so long as those taking part in them are prepared to pay for them. Moreover, collective judgments are often reached, and an infinite number of calculated risks determined, according to political criteria rather than cost-benefit equations. Thus, although economic analysis has spawned some imaginative writing, in the area of tort law it seems to have left the courts rather indifferent. This is especially true outside the United States.

Compensation

      Compensation is arguably the most important contemporary function of tort law, and modern insurance practice has made it easier to satisfy the injured without financially crushing the injurer. The welfare state, however, is now the main source of accident compensation. But even where tort law plays a major compensatory role—for example, in the most serious cases of personal injury—it does not function with great efficiency. Though tort lawyers rightly regard tort as the compensation system that caters best to the particular victim on the basis of the pre-accident situation and prognosis of his future, it nonetheless remains expensive, capricious, and dilatory. The Royal Commission on Civil Liability and Compensation for Personal Injury (1978) in England once estimated that it cost 85 pence to award £1 of net benefits to the victim. (The administrative cost of the New Zealand Scheme was apparently less than 10 percent.) The tort system is capricious in that compensation may depend on finding a tortfeasor (wrongdoer) and credible witnesses, not to mention a good lawyer. Delay can also produce injustice, especially since it tends to benefit wealthy defendants (usually insurance companies) whose in-house legal advisers can sometimes delay payments in the hope of wearing down a plaintiff so that he accepts a low settlement. Difficulties of this kind have led some authors to refer to the tort law as a “forensic lottery” and have given rise to remedial legislation in areas particularly affected, such as automobile accidents. Most importantly, they have led many jurists to reconsider the utility of modern tort law. Nonetheless, threatened radical overhaul of tort law has not taken place.

Loss spreading

      Compensation in its crudest form meant that the cost of an accident was shifted from the victim to the tort-feasor. For a long time the only plausible excuse for such a shift was deemed to be the tort-feasor's fault. Certainly it seemed right to make wrongdoers pay. The corollary, that he who is not at fault need not pay, also appealed to 19th-century judges and jurists, who were often more concerned with shielding nascent industries from the crushing costs of litigation than with compensating the growing number of such industries' victims. Although the first argument still has its appeal, the second has lost cogency given the modern insurance system. This has revolutionized tort reasoning, for victims can now be compensated without tort-feasors' being ruined financially. It thus helps erode the requirement of fault, while strict liability correspondingly proliferates (see below Liability without fault (tort)). Finally, where liability without fault has not been introduced in an open manner, such notions as fault, foreseeability, and causation become stretched in an attempt to do justice to the victim while allegedly remaining faithful to a fault-based law of torts. It is only since about the 1960s that Anglo-American courts have tended to refer openly to such considerations, and they have been active not only in shifting the loss but also in trying to pin it on the person who is in the best position to spread it.

Comparative classification

      Although the common law of torts is in many ways wider than the modern European law of delict, in practice it hides a tendency to deal with tort problems under different headings of the law, such as contract, property (property law), inheritance, or even crimes. For example, in English common law tort has served such modern problems as product liability or liability for negligent statements, whereas French and German law has traditionally relied on contractual solutions. In contrast, the German Civil Code has a basic (tort) provision excluding compensation for negligently inflicted pure economic loss that, along with a narrow rule of vicarious liability, has encouraged the expansion of the law of contract. Defamation also is regarded primarily as a tort in the common law but as a crime in civil-law systems, though in some of the latter it is now seen as a potentially important heading of civil liability. Another difference exists between what the common law describes as trespass to land and the tort of nuisance and what civil lawyers have seen primarily as part of the law of immovable property.

      The choice regarding which part of the (wider) law of obligations is to be used as a solution to emerging legal problems will often depend upon historical factors or doctrines, such as the common-law doctrine of consideration, which nonetheless makes the expansion of contract notions impossible to meet new situations. Conversely, there may be obstructive provisions in the law of tort that make recourse to the law of contract inevitable. This is the case with the German Civil Code, which adopts a weak rule of vicarious liability, allowing masters to exculpate themselves from the wrongs committed by their employees if they can show that they selected and supervised them properly. In such circumstances, some systems (such as the German) have found that recourse to contract provisions may make the imposition of liability easier (even though it may give rise to different problems). See also labour law.

Protection of life, limb, and freedom of movement

Intentional interference

      All legal systems offer extensive protection to life, health, and physical integrity, to which they attach great importance. For example, they regard offenses leading to personal injury, such as assault (assault and battery) (an act producing in the plaintiff/victim a reasonable expectation of immediate unlawful force) and battery (the intentional application of unlawful force), as both torts and crimes (crime) capable of attracting serious criminal sanctions. The same is true of the complete restriction of the plaintiff's freedom of movement without lawful excuse, which can be actionable both as a tort and as a crime. Complicated rules—usually contained in specific criminal statutes—may, however, remove the unlawful element in some cases (e.g., lawful arrest by a police officer or, in limited instances, by a private citizen). Consent by the victim or plaintiff may also make an otherwise unlawful interference lawful. Consent to the infliction of grievous bodily harm, however, is generally regarded as unacceptable, and consent in the context of negligent medical malpractice suits tends to raise complicated issues to which there exist various legal responses. Most of the problems in this context relate to the question of how much information a medical practitioner is required to give to a patient before the latter's consent can be regarded as informed (informed consent being crucial because it eliminates the element of unlawfulness associated with harm resulting from the medical procedure).

      The importance attached by the modern law to human life and limb is also obvious from the appearance (mainly in the mid-20th century) of a number of statutory schemes intended to afford redress to victims of crimes of violence (e.g., the English Criminal Injuries Compensation scheme). This is particularly useful in cases where the assailant is not known or not considered worth suing; it has also often been of great use to policemen injured in the line of duty during civil unrest. Compensation in such cases comes through funds specifically allotted by Parliament, and the amounts awarded are usually calculated in approximate accordance with normal tort rules. Similar schemes can be found in most advanced legal systems, though their role is subsidiary to the normal tort rules, and their award levels tend to be limited.

      Most tort rules covering intentionally inflicted personal injury, though important, are handled by the criminal courts (sometimes with the plaintiff also appearing as a civil party and claiming damages, as in France). Tort law's main contribution is accordingly found in the numerically more significant negligent interferences with life and physical integrity, to which the rest of this article is limited.

negligence

      The conceptual approaches of the common-law, French, and German-inspired systems are quite different. In practice, however, where personal injury is concerned, there must be conduct that (1) is intentional or, more frequently, careless, (2) is not justifiable, and (3) leads to (“causes” in a legal sense) harm. Regarding intention or carelessness, the common-law systems have for various reasons been slower than the civil-law systems in imposing liability for inaction. During the second half of the 20th century, a trend in the United States aimed to relax this individualistic rule, with courts and statutes increasingly imposing (on paper at least) the possibility of liability, especially in the context of failing to render assistance to victims of traffic accidents. Such statutes typically imposed a duty to come to the aid of another person. More frequently, however, bystanders were encouraged to act as good Samaritans by ensuring that the standard of care they had to display was lowered, thereby shielding them against subsequent actions by ungrateful victims. French law by contrast has since 1945 recognized a general duty to aid a person in physical danger if that can be done without risk to the rescuer. Similar provisions can be found in other systems as well (such as the Dutch, the Greek, and the German legal systems), though the slim case law that they seem to have generated would suggest that the value of such rules is mainly educational. The same appears to be true of the American statutes that attempted to broaden potential liability.

      The conduct must be culpable—i.e., intentional or, more typically, careless. Modern legal systems resort to objective criteria to determine the requisite standard of care: the defendant must behave as the bonus pater familias, or, as common lawyers put it, the reasonable man. Both definitions are essentially the anthropomorphic conception of justice enabling courts to adjust the requisite standard according to factors such as the magnitude of the injury, the cost of avoiding it, and the likelihood of its being realized. Nowadays courts tend to treat as carelessness errors that even a reasonable man would make. Here the legal and ordinary meanings of negligence diverge, and this transformation commonly occurs where insurance is obligatory and the courts know that by characterizing the defendant's conduct as negligent they are actually compensating the victim without ruining the defendant.

      Finally, the conduct must have caused the plaintiff's hurt. The problem of causation is widely discussed, especially in medical malpractice cases, though the solutions tend to be similar. The approach in Germany (and, at times, in the United States) is more theoretical than in France and England. Both in Germany and in France the test of causation is the “adequate cause,” and, though differently understood by these systems, this tends to produce results analogous to those reached by the common-law test of “foreseeability.”

Gray areas

      Despite every system's concern for human life and health, interference with these interests is not automatically compensated. In some cases the manner of infliction of the harm determines whether compensation is decreed, as with physical injury resulting from some failure to act, already mentioned above. In others the nature and timing of the interference influence the extent of tort compensation. Compensation for emotional harm or psychological injury is affected by the former consideration, injury to a fetus by the second.

      Legal systems approach these problems differently and can range from the apparently generous to the obviously restrictive. The concepts they use to achieve the desired aim of controlled compensation also differ. The German-inspired systems have long behaved as if the solution depended on a proper application of causative theories. Common law has also tended to disguise the real policy issues, judges often giving the impression that the answer depends on foreseeability or the presence or absence of a “duty of care”; indeed, during the 20th century the latter concept became the prime controlling device. The often bewildering variety of concepts used to keep liability within reasonable bounds, however, should not conceal the fact that the policy reasons behind such moves are common to all. Thus, it is widely recognized that psychological trauma can lead to a multiplicity of actions—some no doubt based on faked claims. Equally important, however, must be the realization that claims of pure emotional harm—unaccompanied by physical or psychological manifestations—have a low priority in a world of limited resources, a world unable to cope adequately or even at all with many kinds of serious accidents, illness, or disease.

      Although the present trend both in the United States and in England is to be skeptical of the validity of these administrative objections, most systems seem to rely on an impressive variety of rules of thumb in an attempt to limit the number of successful plaintiffs. One such rule depends on the distinction between psychiatric injury or shock accompanied by physical or psychological manifestations and mere anguish, pain, or grief—the latter remaining uncompensated. Although widely accepted by both common-law and civil-law systems, this rule has been challenged in some U.S. jurisdictions. Another device is to limit compensation to a person within the danger zone; another and more liberal approach allows even those not within the danger zone to recover damages so long as their shock results from seeing or hearing the accident with their own unaided senses. But even here exceptions are being made in the case of “meritorious” plaintiffs. Thus, in England a woman who suffered shock through seeing her injured husband and children in the hospital soon after an accident (at which she was not present) was allowed to recover damages (McLoughlin v. O'Brian [1983]).

      But in the United States an almost exact factual equivalent led to the opposite conclusion in Thing v. La Chusa (1989), in which the Supreme Court of California denied the plaintiff an award because she had not witnessed the injury her son received from an automobile accident caused by the defendant. When decisions of this nature cannot be reconciled through legal means, they are best viewed through the sociopolitical context of the time and place as well as the temperament of the deciding judge. Incidentally, this contextual approach to tort law provided a new perspective by which to study the subject of tort reconciliation. Many lawyers, however, see worrying signs of uncertainty, if not a comprehensive threat to tort law, in such a context-sensitive approach.

      Problems also arise when injury is inflicted to a fetus or when harm is suffered by a female prior to conception. Initially both common-law and civil-law systems were reluctant to sanction damages for prenatal injuries, because of evidentiary reasons—the difficulty of establishing a causal link between accident and fetal injury—and conceptual difficulties connected with the foreseeability of the victim-fetus. The precise legal status of the fetus has also troubled experts in criminal and property law. Damages were first awarded to a fetus in the United States in 1946, in Australia in 1972, in Canada in 1973, and in England in 1976 by the Congenital Disabilities (Civil Liability) Act. Differences remain as to details (e.g., is it enough that the fetus was viable at the time of the injury, or must it also be born alive?). More importantly, the difficulties attendant to this topic have increased, as the paradigmatic form of inflicting these injuries—physical impact on the mother—has now been replaced by the more invidious interference of toxic substances affecting the human body over a long period of time. This represents a growing area of tort law that is best handled through interdisciplinary approaches, which take into account the complex corpus of regulatory law that deals with environmental damage.

      A subsequent and even more troublesome development has involved the so-called wrongful conception, wrongful birth, and wrongful life actions, appearing first in the United States (from about the early 1970s) and later in Europe. The harmful event is typically negligence on the part of a doctor who fails to carry out effectively a sterilization operation, with the result that an “unwanted” child is born (whether impaired in health or otherwise). These are the wrongful conception cases. Alternatively, a medical practitioner's negligence may consist of failure to diagnose an illness in the mother—e.g., rubella in the early stages of pregnancy—with the result that the opportunity for an abortion is lost and a child is born (usually) with impaired health. The child's action (for wrongful life) consists mainly of a claim that, but for the doctor's negligence, it would not exist at all; the parents' claim (for wrongful birth) is for pain and suffering and, most importantly, the extra costs of rearing the “unwanted” child. The first claim has been rejected by courts of all systems on grounds ranging from the most technical (How does one assess damages?) to the most philosophical (Should the court be allowed to decide issues of the value and quality of life?). In reality, however, these and other arguments are excuses for the courts' refusal to come to grips with a serious problem on which there is no general consensus. Although courts have been slow to recognize such claims to children, they are nonetheless increasingly willing to grant them special damages connected with their handicap, and judges also are more generously inclined when compensating parents who bring wrongful birth actions.

Protection (property law) of property (real and personal property)

Land and its enjoyment

      In modern civil-law systems, protection is given by provisions found in both the property and tort sections of the codes. Common-law systems give property owners equivalent protection, but through the law of torts. Thus, direct physical intrusion on the property of another falls within the province of the old tort of trespass. This succeeds without any proof of special damage and is defeated only by rather narrowly defined pleas such as that of imminent necessity (to protect the intruder or his property) or inevitable accident.

      Other interests in land, however, receive a more qualified protection and must yield to the test of reasonableness. A miscellany of wrongs, ranging from encroachment of branches or roots to falling tiles or slates from nearby roofs, are covered by the amorphous tort of private nuisance, which also covers such interferences as excessive vibrations, noise, smells, and other, more modern, instances of pollution. The emphasis is not on the unreasonableness of the defendant's conduct, as in the tort of negligence, but on the unreasonableness of the interference with the plaintiff's use and enjoyment of his land. The unifying element is the type of harm, and the law's overall aim is to protect an individual's right to enjoy the amenities of his land within the general framework of give-and-take necessary in an increasingly crowded world.

      Balancing competing interests is therefore the key feature, and numerous judgments make it a difficult area of law. Its particular interest lies in the fact that, along with other branches of the law (e.g., administrative law and criminal law), it can help perform zoning functions in the use of land; however, attempts to utilize it in protecting the environment have not, on the whole, been very successful. In short this is an old tort that has been deployed to cope with modern developments, especially by North American systems.

      The gravity of any interference with the plaintiff's land is a major consideration. Older English decisions distinguish between sensible material damage to the land and mere interference with its use and enjoyment. The distinction—not found in any rigid form in civil-law systems—is, however, often unworkable; and to the extent that it reflects a past valuing of tangible forms of property over intangible ones, it may be inadequate. The duration of the interference may also be crucial, temporary annoyances being on the whole more tolerable. The nature of the locality has also been taken into account. This has a mixed effect, however. It has certainly helped preserve rural and residential areas against intruding noxious trades; but it has also permitted increased industrial pollution.

      The more important the purpose of the activity complained about, the greater the tendency to grant effective authorization of the nuisance by legislative fiat. But the effect of the nuisance—typically an oil refinery or airport—on its victims can be catastrophic, often amounting to indirect expropriation of their land. Hence, there exist special compensation acts or constitutional clauses providing for compensation.

Chattels

      The law affords wide protection to proprietary interests over chattels. Again, this can involve using a proprietary remedy to reclaim goods removed from their rightful owner or to claim damages for chattels affected by a tort-feasor's intentional or negligent conduct. Intentional interference with goods is unusual and therefore receives specialized treatment by some systems. Most cases arise in connection with damaged movables, and here the more modern tort of negligence often applies, the problem usually being the extent of compensation. For example, if an automobile is damaged in a collision, its owner will be able to claim from the wrongdoer the cost of repairs. But can such cost be claimed if it exceeds that of purchasing a similar vehicle? And what of extra transportation costs incurred during the period of repair or the expense of hiring an equivalent substitute? Even more controversial are recent claims for such injuries as a lost or ruined holiday following damage to the vehicle. Although the latter claim tends to be regarded as extravagant (and beyond the competence of tort law at least), the others tend to be satisfied, subject to the rules of remoteness and the pervading test of reasonableness (e.g., the victim cannot hire a luxury automobile to replace a damaged economy car). In other instances, however, theoretical doubts may arise as to whether there is interference with property or mere economic loss. For example, if a canal leading to a millpond collapses, trapping but not damaging a vessel, has the owner of the vessel suffered property damage or mere economic loss? Or if a fire forces the police to cordon off an area, depriving its residents of access to their automobiles, have they suffered a property interference? Sometimes courts focus on the duration of the interference and treat prolonged deprivation as equivalent to property damage. In other cases, however, they treat these instances as cases of pure economic loss and reject any claim for compensation.

Negligently inflicted pure economic loss

      Economic loss can arise in numerous ways: an employer deprived of the services of a key employee; a child deprived of the financial support of his father; negligent advice given by A to B and relied upon by C; a defective will negligently attested by the lawyers who drew it up, depriving the intended beneficiary of his legacy; or negligent actions during road construction that damage a municipality's electric cables, depriving many nearby factories and homes of electrical power. An enduring question is whether all the parties harmed by these activities should be able to recover compensation for their losses.

      Common-law and German-inspired systems have here faced enormous difficulties, partly because the courts' reasoning seems to be motivated by administrative considerations: if one such claim is accepted, many others will follow. Another difficulty stems from the fact that many of these cases sit uncomfortably on the traditional divide between contract and tort. Yet a third problem arises from the particular structural deficiencies of each system. For example, the narrow rule of vicarious liability found in the German Civil Code, along with its express exclusion of negligently inflicted pure economic loss from the protection of the main tort provision, has led German lawyers to expand their law of contract to provide a remedy in some of the above-mentioned situations. In contrast, a rigid law of contract, especially in the English common law, has led to an expansion—often far-fetched and ill-considered—of the law of tort, though this is nowadays in retreat. On the whole, however, German law and common law have come up with fairly similar solutions proclaiming, unlike French law, a general though increasingly ill-defined hostility toward compensating pure economic loss. These disputes have given rise to some judgments that have attempted to work out solutions on the basis of a better understanding of the insurance implications—notably, in the Canadian Supreme Court case Canadian National Railway v. Norsk Pacific Steamship Co. (1992), in which the court had to decide whether the main user of a negligently destroyed bridge could claim the extra costs of transporting products to the island that the bridge once served. Such cases have given rise to fascinating academic theories that have nonetheless failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of why, in the Romanistic legal family (e.g., France, Italy, and Spain), the compensation of pure economic loss does not appear to be the problem that it seems to be in the common-law and Germanic systems.

Protection of honour, reputation, and privacy

      The protection of individuals' honour, reputation, and privacy in Western systems is, on the whole, adequate, though it is achieved in varied ways. One factor accounting for the hesitation regarding when to provide protection is linked to the difficulty of balancing privacy rights against free speech. Another is the historical preference of civil-law systems for bringing many instances of defamation under criminal law. Finally, the constitutional environment has had a great impact on this part of tort law. In the United States the tendency since the mid-1960s has been to sacrifice human reputation and privacy to the First Amendment, with its unambiguous preference for free speech. Thus, American law does not allow an action (at any rate where media defendants are involved) unless the plaintiff-victim can prove that the allegation was made with “actual malice”—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. In the United States the plaintiff must also prove that the defendant's statement is false, with the result that many of the traditional common-law defenses are bypassed. The idea behind this is that any contrary decision restricts the constitutional right to free speech.

      English law, by contrast, is much more jealous of reputation, though numerous complicated defenses also make sure that free speech is not totally throttled. But in the main the English law of defamation is complex and archaic. The old distinction between libel and slander (defamatory matter in permanent and in transient form, respectively) is preserved; the plaintiff is not entitled to legal aid (with the practical consequence that only wealthy people can afford to sue); the action can succeed without any proof of special damage (giving an unwarranted advantage to corporations, since they thus acquire the benefit of rules designed for human beings); the cause of action does not survive the death of either party; and, finally, juries are often used and are entitled (in one of the rare instances of English law) to award punitive damages. No summary can do justice to this peculiar but important tort, but, according to English legal scholar Tony Weir's A Casebook on Tort (1974), it may well be that its defects arise

because it uses a single remedy, the action for damages, in order to perform three distinct purposes: (a) to permit people to clear their reputation from unfounded allegations; (b) to allow people to claim compensation for harm they suffer because others have abused freedom of speech; and (c) to repress gratuitous vituperation, scurrilous disparagement and malignant calumny.

      Weir goes on to say that

only for (b) are damages the appropriate remedy. For (a) we need a procedure for retraction or correction, and for (c) we need the public stocks.

      Several more-recent developments may be influencing changes in English law. American law thus seems to be encouraging a trend to protect speech through the enlargement of certain traditional defenses, while human rights legislation, including the Human Rights Act of 1998, is forcing English courts to take into account the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The right to a fair trial, for instance, has been used to challenge the unrestricted use of the notion of duty of care (see above Gray areas (tort)) and the resulting extensive “immunities” that it has conferred on many statutory bodies for their undoubtedly negligent behaviour. Such developments reflect changes in thinking over time as well as a change in the sources of law. Conservative English lawyers, however, have accepted them only hesitantly or have opposed them outright; and the law regarding the liability of local authorities remains complex and, many would say, unsatisfactory. Such developments also demonstrate the growing impact that public law and human rights law are having on a subject that once formed part of pure private (and in England, judge-made) law.

      Protecting the various aspects of the human personality and privacy (privacy, rights of) is also a growing concern of Western legal systems, though again they set about achieving this aim in different ways. The need for such a protection was first stressed by German and U.S. academics toward the end of the 19th century, but their arguments were rejected on both sides of the Atlantic because of fears that it would lead to increased litigation and inhibit free speech. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the first attempts at protection were made in Germany and the United States. Many of these dealt with the unauthorized use of a person's likeness. Others concerned unauthorized use of names or publication of private correspondence. With litigation, a patchy but growing protection began to emerge. In 1948–49 the drafters of the West German Grundgesetz (“Basic Law”) reacted against the utter disregard for human dignity prevalent during the Third Reich and for the first time inserted into German law general provisions protecting human personality. Protection of this sort was transferred to the field of civil law in the early and middle 1950s, when a series of important decisions gradually shaped a general right of personality for the violation of which damages could be awarded under the general law of delict. The process was complicated and protracted, and what exists now is a casuistic, judge-made right. But in general the protection afforded to human privacy is extensive, with German judges successfully balancing the competing interests with great courage and effectiveness.

      American law meanwhile was classifying and refining the many headings of actionable privacy created by statute or wide-ranging judicial pronouncements: appropriation of likeness, unreasonable intrusion, false light cases (i.e., those in which the plaintiff claims to have been placed in a false light by the defendant), and public disclosure of private facts on a matter that would be highly offensive and objectionable to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities. The overall protection thus achieved was extensive and not dissimilar to that of German law, though once again the concern to protect First Amendment rights has seriously stunted certain headings of actionable privacy.

      The protection of privacy acquired a new urgency during the later part of the 20th century as increased technological ability to collect, collate, and disseminate information made it possible to interfere with human personality, solitude, and privacy to an unprecedented extent. In some countries, such as France, new articles were introduced in the civil code to deal with the matter, while others passed special legislation dealing with a modern and dangerous form of invasion connected with data banks and the linking up of information contained within them. To this tendency even English law has not been immune, though the protection afforded remains patchy and casuistic. The creation of a general right of privacy was rejected in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s, partly on the grounds that it was difficult to define but mainly because of sustained opposition from the British press. Thus, although English law does not recognize a general right of privacy similar to that embodied in the French Civil Code or created by the German courts, it often achieves comparable results through the ingenious use of existing torts (defamation, trespass, nuisance, passing off) or the law of contract, criminal law, or restitution. Once again, however, this picture may be about to change as a result of the English Human Rights Act 1998.

liability without fault

The growing dissatisfaction with fault

      Whatever the original foundations of tortious liability, by the 19th century it had come to rest firmly upon the notion of fault. The principle that a human being should make good the harm caused by his fault seemed eminently reasonable. But the converse of this principle, namely that there can be no liability where there is no fault, offered an additional attraction to an era that was concerned with not forcing nascent industries to pay sizeable awards that they could ill afford at a time of weak insurance practices. In this sense fault also helped retain the boundaries of liability within manageable proportions. To this coincidence of morality and economic expediency the notion of fault doubtless owes much of its aura of soundness and inevitability. Consequently, when the first serious challenge to the notion started to materialize toward the end of the 19th century, it invariably had to be disguised.

      Fault, as understood in the 19th century, presupposed free will and, further, that an agent could choose between performing an action in a perceptibly dangerous way and performing it in some safer way. Thus, legal negligence involved something of personal moral shortcoming; the person who was held liable had been guilty of ethical as well as legal wrong. And since fault involved a more or less informed choice, it was possible to see how the prospect of liability could influence a choice for the better—a concept embodying the principle of social utility, for it theoretically edified potential defendants by encouraging them to behave more carefully.

      With the growing mechanization and industrialization of the second half of the 19th century and the resulting multiplication of accidents, this kind of approach came under more and more scrutiny. Consequently, both the moral and the purely educative aspects of the fault system were increasingly questioned, especially as insurance companies were now meeting the cost of accidents; in addition, the idea of leaving victims uncompensated became politically unattractive as the extended franchise made politicians more sensitive to voters' grievances. This change of attitude, however, could not alone have altered the legal system if economic changes had not also favoured reappraisal of the problems of civil liability. From the turn of the century, industry, with the help of insurance, became increasingly sturdy and less in need of protection. The shift toward the plaintiff's point of view manifested itself in three main ways: greater use of the doctrine of vicarious liability; increased objectivization of the notion of carelessness, coupled with the use of presumptions of carelessness; and, finally, the open introduction of strict liability.

Vicarious liability

      Vicarious liability is liability imposed on the employer of an employee for the tort of the latter when committed in the course of his employment. This is a form of strict liability, since the “innocent” master is made liable for the fault of his employee.

      Many reasons have been advanced to justify this departure from the fault principle. They have ranged from the purely pragmatic (the employee is rarely worth suing) to the most political (those with “deep pockets” should pay). None, however, fully explain the doctrine, which seems to have developed more in response to the demands of social convenience and rough justice than as a consequence of clear, consistent legal explication.

      Most systems have opted for true vicarious liability—i.e., liability that makes the employer liable for the employee's wrongs. However, German law and, in varying degrees, other German-inspired systems have opted for what is sometimes called the “master's tort” theory. This theory probably results from a misreading of Roman texts as well as the desire to protect small industrial concerns at the end of the 19th century. It makes the master liable only if he is personally at fault in selecting or supervising his employee or in failing to supply him with proper equipment. It is enshrined in the German Civil Code, and in practice it has proved so unacceptable as to lead first to the ingenious expansion of the law of contract (aided by a number of codal provisions) in order to rectify the shortcomings of the law of tort and later to the discovery of what common lawyers would call personal nondelegable duties, allowing the imposition of primary liability on the employer under the main provision of the German code. (See worker's compensation (workers' compensation).)

      This peculiarity apart, all systems agree that vicarious liability will be imposed only if there is an employer-employee relationship and the wrong is committed in the course of employment. Where simpler operations have been involved, the control test has been crucial for determining whether this relationship or the one between employer and independent contractor is the one involved. (In the latter, the employer bears no responsibility for the wrongdoing of the contractor.) But in more-complicated situations all systems resort to a variety of tests. These include, for example, how remuneration (wage or lump sum) is paid, to what extent a worker is integrated into the employer's business, who supplies the capital or equipment, and, more generally, the nature of the surrounding circumstances and the other terms of the contract.

      However, in this area of the law, by far the most troublesome problem is whether the wrong was committed in the course of employment. Its solution tends to be impressionistic, depending on the skillful use of numerous and often contradictory decisions, which can be used only as helpful guidelines and not as rigid principles. There appears to be a tendency to interpret this requirement more strictly in German than in French law and its derivatives, with the common law standing somewhere in between.

Presumptions of fault and responsibility

      The trend away from identifying negligence with moral blameworthiness, coupled with a tendency to put the onus of proof of non-fault on the defendant, often resulted in liability that was in all but name strict liability. The most forthright developments occurred in France, where the courts transformed the code to accommodate problems arising in an industrial society.

      This change came in the late 19th century, when the French courts, faced with an inactive legislature and growing social pressures to compensate victims of industrial accidents, boldly created a new rule of liability out of the seemingly unpromising first paragraph of article 1384 of the code. The article in question, which proclaims generally that one is responsible not only for one's own acts but also for damage done by things in one's control, was originally conceived as a stylistically desirable linking sentence between the first two delict provisions, which enunciated the rule of fault liability, and the last two provisions, which dealt with some narrow instances of risk liability (e.g., animals or collapsing buildings). But in 1896 the Court of Cassation (Cour de Cassation) (the highest court of civil and criminal matters in France) felt that the time had come to give these words an independent significance, thereby enabling, for example, the widow of a victim of a boiler explosion to recover damages without having to prove the fault of the victim's employer.

      Within a year of this decision, the French Chamber of Deputies passed a workman's compensation act, in effect removing accidents at work from the province of tort law. This piece of legislation constituted a temporary delay in the development of the new rule. The appearance of the automobile, however, gave the rule fresh life, and, after some hesitation, the Court of Cassation finally accepted in the Jand'heur decision (1930) that article 1384 established a presumption of responsibility against the guardian of a thing; this responsibility could not be rebutted by evidence of no fault or lack of explanation of the cause of the damage but only by clear positive evidence that the damage was due to an event unforeseeable and external both to the guardian and to the thing that made the accident unavoidable.

      In the years that followed, much refinement of the elements of liability (the meaning of “thing,” causation, definition of guard, etc.) took place, but the trend has been to expand liability, especially in the context of traffic accidents. This expansion, largely the result of increased insurance protection, received a boost in 1968 when the Court of Cassation decided that the rule of article 1384 could be used in favour of nonpaying car passengers and, more recently, in 1982 when in the Desmares decision the defense of contributory fault of the victim was seriously restricted by the second chamber of the court. This decision represented a bold step toward protecting nonmotorists, but its precise ambit was unspecified, raising fears of increased insurance premiums and provoking considerable judicial uncertainty. Perhaps the most beneficial effect of this decision, however, was to hasten enactment of a strict liability road traffic act.

Strict liability statutes

      The French Road Traffic Act of July 5, 1985, a long and stylistically complicated enactment, has gone a long way toward improving the position of victims of traffic accidents, though not as far as some would have wished. For example, although any contributory negligence on the part of some victims (children under the age of 16 and adults over 70 [article 3]) is completely ignored, that on the part of others, notably the drivers themselves, may be taken into account (article 4), their negligence reducing or in appropriate circumstances even extinguishing their damages. It was only compromises such as this, however, that ensured the passing of the act. Be that as it may, the act is indicative of a modern trend to introduce strict liability through specialized statutes rather than to elaborate the already overworked article 1384 of the Civil Code.

      Strict liability statutes are proliferating the world over and survive alongside judge-made rules such as that enunciated by the English decision of Ryland v. Fletcher (1868), which held that anyone who in the course of “non-natural” use of his land accumulates thereon for his own purposes anything likely to do mischief if it escapes is answerable for all direct damage thereby caused. The German statutes, however, deserve special attention. First, in Germany strict liability has been introduced only by specific enactments, while the Civil Code, minor exceptions apart, remains faithful to the fault principle. Moreover, such is the monopoly of the legislator in this area that the courts have even restrained themselves from extending analogous strict liability statutes to similar situations (though other German-inspired systems—e.g., the Austrian—have not followed this route). Second, the vast majority of German strict liability statutes contain similar clauses on the monetary limits of liability per damage-inflicting incident. Likewise, defenses such as contributory negligence appear in most statutes. Finally, the compensation under the statutes does not cover damages for pain and suffering, so that if such items are to be claimed, or the monetary limits are inadequate, recourse to the ordinary rules of tort is permissible. In other systems, however (e.g., the Swiss), where the strict liability statutes do not contain the above-mentioned type of limitations, application of the ordinary law is excluded.

Tort law and alternative methods of compensation

      As already stated, compensation for personal injury and damage to property is a major aim of tort law. The objective is full compensation wherever possible, and in this respect tort compensation differs from funds received from the welfare state system in that the latter often tend to be calculated on a flat-rate basis.

      Compensation for physical injury includes consideration of past and future economic losses as well as monetary satisfaction for a variety of nonfinancial items of damage, such as pain and suffering or loss of amenities, which are not amenable to precise mathematical calculation. The various headings of damage do not have exact parallels in all systems, but similar factors tend to be taken into account when calculating the final award. In some systems, such as the French, where the actual calculation of damages is treated as a question of fact and is left to the judge of first instance, regional variations in the size of awards occur. In England, by contrast, since the abolition of civil juries in personal injury cases there has been a greater standardization for certain headings of damages. Common-law systems prefer lump sum awards, whereas in civil-law systems periodic payments are favoured. In many instances the difference appears to be one of theory rather than of practice. Thus, even where periodic payments are preferred, courts often order or facilitate the award of damages in a lump sum, partly because victims tend to prefer this method and partly because any future complications are avoided. A third and perhaps equally important reason is that lawyers can more easily exact their fees from lump sums than from relatively small installments, however regular.

      If the victim dies, all systems tend to allow his estate to claim whatever he could have claimed had he been alive. The conditions for bringing this action vary, however (German law, for example, is more restrictive than English law). Right to action is also given to the dependents of the deceased. In the common-law systems this is expressly created by statute (the so-called fatal accidents or wrongful death statutes); in German law the action is authorized by the Civil Code, while in French law and its derivatives it is based on the general provision of article 1382. Systems also tend to differ over the question of who should be allowed to sue under this heading. Common-law statutes specifically designate the list of dependents, insisting additionally that they are actually supported by the deceased at the time of his death or, at the very least, have a reasonable probability of an imminent dependency. In contrast, German law limits claims to persons having a legal right to maintenance, and these persons are listed in the family section of the Civil Code. French law appears to be open-ended, insisting only on actual dependency at the time of the death. The difference with the other two major systems is more apparent than real, however, the courts often excluding claims by nonrelatives through various causative devices.

      Alongside tort, social welfare (social welfare program) systems proliferate, operating through a tangle of complicated rules, often with little or no attempt to relate the two systems. The full picture of compensation for accidents depends on close study of parallel but limited schemes—e.g., for accidents at work, for road traffic accidents, or for victims of crime—which in some systems coexist along with tort but in others tend to displace it. This unhappy coexistence is one of immense complexity and, no doubt, waste, both of which most commentators have criticized. Despite such criticisms, few countries have attempted the kind of wholesale reform of the all-embracing no-fault system of compensation that New Zealand introduced in the early 1970s, a system that is financed out of general taxation, contributions from employers and employees, and a levy on motor vehicles. There are several reasons for this, but cost is, no doubt, an important factor, even though critics of the tort system maintain that one should also weigh the extra cost of automatic compensation against the savings brought by the abolition of the tort system. But further difficulties exist. Should such automatic compensation be linked to accidents or should it also cover illness? Should compensation be determined by the victim's circumstances before the accident or be based on flat rates? And should the emphasis be on compensating the victim's economic loss with, perhaps, token sums awarded for non-pecuniary loss (as with the New Zealand scheme) or should non-pecuniary loss receive more generous treatment (as under tort law)? The debate on these points adds to the theoretical and practical interest of this subject, even though there is little sign of the New Zealand system being adopted in any major Western country.

Contemporary trends

      During the last quarter of the 20th century, tort law was repeatedly criticized (mainly in the United States but also in other countries, including England) as being complicated and slow, costly to society, and beneficial primarily to trial attorneys. The complaints were not without merit, yet the proposed alternatives won neither universal nor even wide approval. Therefore, tort law, as a set of rules regulating part of the compensation process, moved into the 21st century more or less unchanged. Its survival as a comprehensive body of law cannot be attributed solely to the lack of a compelling alternative; its durability is also demonstrated in the extent to which the rules, once intended for a relatively primitive society, have proved adaptable to the needs of a more complex world. The survival of tort law thus reflects a convergence in basic principles and aims that transcends the traditional division of legal systems into different families. Such a convergence is likely to continue, as some of the new forces that are shaping the tort law of the 21st century also have a universal flavour about them. This universality is thus found in the sources of modern tort litigation (e.g., cases involving toxic substances or insufficiently tested medications) as much as in the growing and global concern for the effective protection of human rights. Allowing such values to flourish is thus no longer the concern of the so-called Western world alone, nor can the task be entrusted only to what was once considered the exclusive domain of public law. These underlying similarities and the increasingly global nature of law firms is also evident in the trend toward global class actions. This trend is bound to provide a new stimulus for tort law as it continues to develop a more international flavour in the 21st century. It will also prove to be a source of new ideas for those scholars who realize that the subject and its rules are no longer constrained by national boundaries. It is therefore likely that differences in the practice of tort law will be shaped largely by differences in procedure and economic conditions appropriate to each country rather than by any fundamental difference in the legal rules applied.

Additional Reading

American law

A one-volume treatise on American law is Dan B. Dobbs, The Law of Torts (2000). A multivolume account can be found in Fowler V. Harper, Fleming James, Jr., and Oscar S. Gray, Harper, James, and Gray on Torts, 3rd ed. (2006– ). The most stimulating book about American tort law in its wider context is John G. Fleming, The American Tort Process (1988), which, inter alia, explains why tort law in the United States has come to differ so significantly from its English progenitor.

English law

The standard authority on English law is Margaret R. Brazier (ed.), Clerk & Lindsell on Torts, 17th ed. (1995). John G. Fleming, The Law of Torts, 9th ed. (1998), published posthumously, arguably offers the most stimulating treatment. Simon Deakin, Angus Johnston, and B.S. Markesinis, Markesinis and Deakin's Tort Law, 6th ed. (2007), adopts a policy-oriented presentation of the law. Peter Cane, Atiyah's Accidents, Compensation, and the Law, 7th ed. (2006), provides a thought-provoking account of the workings of various systems of compensation.

French law

Henry Mazeaud et al., Traité théorique et pratique de la responsabilité civile délictuelle et contractuelle, 6th ed., 3 vol. in 4 (1965–83), is the classic exposition of French law. An excellent, more modern presentation can be found in Jacques Ghestin (ed.), Traité de droit civil, vol. 4 and 5, Les Obligations: la responsabilité: conditions (1982), and Introduction à la responsabilité, 2nd ed. (1995), both by Geneviève Viney.

German law

Karl Larenz and Claus-Wilhelm Canaris, Lehrbuch des Schuldrechts, vol. 2, Besonderer Teil, 13th ed., 2 vol. (1994), is a classic text; Hein Kötz and Gerhard Wagner, Deliktsrecht, 10th rev. ed. (2006), is a smaller but highly respected treatise on German law.

Comparative law

H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Causation in the Law, 2nd ed. (1985), is the classic monograph on causation. Other comparative discussions include André Tunc, La Responsabilité civile (1981); Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz, Einfürung in die Rechtsvergleichung auf dem Gebiete des Privatrechts, 3rd rev. ed., 2 vol. (1997), the first edition of which is also available in English as An Introduction to Comparative Law (1998); and F.H. Lawson and B.S. Markesinis, Tortious Liability for Unintentional Harm in the Common Law and the Civil Law, 2 vol. (1982). B.S. Markesinis, The German Law of Obligations, vol. 2, The Law of Torts, 3rd ed. (1997), offers a detailed examination of German, English, and American tort law through a detailed commentary and translated decisions. Christian von Bar, Gemein europäisches Delikts recht, 2 vol. (1996–99), gives a briefer but more wide-ranging account of western European tort law, along with copious bibliographical references. Walter van Gerven, Jeremy Lever, and Pierre Larouche, Common Law of Europe Casebooks: Tort Law (2001), is part of a series concerning the common law of Europe.Sir Basil S. Markesinis

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