Civil wrongs and who pays for them — negligence, causation, strict and product liability, and the line between harm and liability.
10 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Donoghue v Stevenson
House of Lords · 1932
Holds that a manufacturer owes a duty of care to the ultimate consumer of its product, deriving a general 'neighbour principle' that anyone…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Right to Privacy
Warren & Brandeis · 1890
Argues American common law already contains, implicit in existing property and tort cases, a distinct right 'to be let alone' that should be…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Treatise on the Measure of Damages
Theodore Sedgwick · 1847
Systematises the common-law rules for measuring damages across tort and contract into a single account, distinguishing compensable loss the law will…
+4 more at this level
9 works
House of Lords
Holds that a manufacturer owes a duty of care to the ultimate consumer of its product, deriving a general 'neighbour principle' that anyone reasonably foreseeable as harmed by carelessness is owed a duty.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyWarren & Brandeis
Argues American common law already contains, implicit in existing property and tort cases, a distinct right 'to be let alone' that should be recognised as its own actionable privacy tort.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyNew York Court of Appeals
Holds that a defendant's duty of care runs only to plaintiffs within the foreseeable zone of danger, so a plaintiff injured by an unforeseeable chain of events recovers nothing however directly it was caused.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copySupreme Court of the United States
Holds that a public official cannot recover for a defamatory falsehood about official conduct unless it was published with 'actual malice' — knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore Sedgwick
Systematises the common-law rules for measuring damages across tort and contract into a single account, distinguishing compensable loss the law will remedy from speculative harm it will not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Sets out the 'Hand formula' for negligence, holding a defendant is at fault only where the burden of taking precautions is less than the probability of harm multiplied by the harm's severity.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyWilliam L. Prosser
Argues American courts were already abandoning privity and negligence requirements case by case in favour of strict liability for defective products, and should complete the shift openly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyCalabresi & Melamed
Argues American courts settling nuisance and other entitlement disputes must choose between protecting an entitlement with a property rule (an injunction) or a liability rule (damages), and sets out when each is preferable.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyRichard A. Epstein
Argues American tort liability should rest on the defendant having caused harm at all, rather than on the fault-based negligence standard that came to dominate the field in the twentieth century.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy