Volume 11, Issue 1 - The Role of History in Tort Theory

I plan to spend most of my time today setting forth the details of an episode in the mid twentieth-century history of American tort law, from which I intend to draw some observations on the place of history in tort law, or, put more precisely, the relationship between tort law and its surrounding cultural contexts, which amount to, when one has some distance from those contexts, its history. But before getting to that episode, I want to state, in general terms, what I take the relationship of tort law to its history to be. I don’t think tort law is any different from any other field of law, private or public, in its relationship to history. I’ve completed two books in a series called Law in American History, and am in the process of writing a third. The coverage of those works ranges from the colonial years through the twentieth century, and I take up fields in both public and private law, including torts. Throughout the books my theory of the relationship of law to its “history”–its surrounding contexts–is that the relationship is reciprocal. Law, at any point in time, is both affected by developments in the larger culture and affects them.

Using tort law’s treatment of claims for domestic violence and sexual assault as examples, this essay identifies prominent features of a feminist historical approach to law to demonstrate how gender inequality is reproduced over time, despite changes in legal doctrine. When informed by feminist theory, history can function as a critique of past and present regimes of inequality, highlighting the various techniques of exclusion and marginalization that emerge to prevent law from redressing serious, recurring injuries suffered disproportionately by women. The essay explores two such techniques: sexual exceptionalism that treats gender-related torts differently than other harms and the adoption of ostensibly neutral rules that have a disparate impact on women and marginalized groups. The essay speculates as to whether the #MeToo movement can provide the momentum to produce a break from the past, particularly with respect to third-party claims holding employers and other institutional defendants responsible for sexualized harms.

Waves of technological change explain the most important transformations of American tort law. In this Article, I begin by examining historical instances of this linkage. Following the Industrial Revolution, for example, machines, no longer humans and animals, powered production. With greater force, locomotives and other machines inflicted far more severe injuries. These dramatic technological changes prompted the replacement of the preexisting strict liability tort standard with the negligence regime. Similarly, later technological changes caused the enactment of workers’ compensation statutes, the implementation of automobile no-fault systems in some states and routinized automobile settlement practices in others that resemble a no-fault system, and the adoption of “strict” products liability. From this history, I derive a model explaining how technological innovation alters (1) the frequency of personal injuries, (2) the severity of such injuries, (3) the difficulty of proving claims, and (4) the new technology’s social utility. These four factors together determine the choice among three liability standards: strict liability, negligence, and no-fault liability with limited damages. I then apply this model to the looming technological revolution in which autonomous vehicles, robots, and other Artificial Intelligence machines will replace human decision-making as well as human force. I conclude that the liability system governing autonomous vehicles is likely to be one similar to the workers’ compensation system in which the victim is relieved of the requirement of proving which party acted tortiously and caused the accident.

In the landmark case of MacPherson v. Buick, an automobilecompany was held liable for negligence notwithstanding a lack of privity withthe injured driver. Four decades later, in Henningsenv. Bloomfield Motors, the court held unconscionable the standard automobilecompany warranty which limited its responsibility to repair and replacement,even in a case involving physical injury. This suggests a puzzle: if it were soeasy for firms to contract out of liability, did MacPherson accomplish anything?