Torts as Wrongs

All of the standard substantive first-year law courses seem to address a basic legal category. All, that is, save one. Property is about the relationship of persons to things that can be owned and alienated. Criminal Law, at its core, concerns rules so important that their violation elicits from the state its harshest action: punishment. The odd man out, it seems, is Torts. As it tends to be taught today, Torts is accident-law-plus. Its most noted chestnuts involve claims for negligence or strict liability. The goal of this article is to put people back on track, not just pedagogically but theoretically. Tort is indeed a basic category of law. To see this, however, one must abandon the notion, now deeply entrenched, that tort law is law for allocating the costs of accidents. As its name indicates, tort law is about wrongs. The law of torts is a law of wrongs and recourse -- what Blackstone called private wrongs.