Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History / Edition 1

by G. Edward White

Overview

Widely regarded as a standard in the field, G. Edward White's Tort Law in America is a concise and accessible history of the way legal scholars and judges have conceptualized the subject of torts, the reasons that changes in certain rules and doctrines have occurred, and the people who brought about these changes.

Now in an expanded edition, Tort Law in America features a new preface that places the book within the current scholarship and two new chapters covering developments in American tort law over the past fifteen years. White approaches his subject from four perspectives: intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, the phenomenon of professionalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, and the recurrent concerns of tort law since its emergence as a discrete field. He puts the intellectual history of this unique branch of law into the general picture of philosophy, sociology, and literature in what is not only a major work of legal scholarship but also a tour de force for anyone interested in American intellectual history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195139655
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2003
Edition description:	ENL
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	8.42(w) x 5.52(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

G. Edward White is Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School and author of The American Judicial Tradition.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Intellectual Origins of Torts in America
2. The Impact of Legal Science on Tort Law, 1880-1910
3. The Impact of Realism on Tort Law, 1910-1945
4. The Twentieth-Century Judge as Torts Theorist: Cardozo
5. William Prosser, Consensus Thought, and the Nature of Tort Law, 1945-1970
6. The Twentieth-Century Judge as Torts Theorist: Traynor
7. The 1970s: Neoconceptualism and the Future of Tort Law
8. The Unexpected Persistence of Negligence, 1980-2000
9. Entering the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"White has confirmed his reputation as one of the foremost figures in the field of American legal history."—Harvard Law Review

"[White] makes convincing sequence out of the muddy history of American tort law, tracing it from Victorian concepts of punishable wrongdoing through the dark thickets of negligence, contributory negligence and last clear chance, to the myriad modern conceptions of how the cost of accidents should be apportioned among the public....It is a brilliant and imaginative essay."—Louis Auchincloss

"An exciting chronicle of the development of an intriguing and currently important area of the law."—Marc A. Franklin, Stanford Law School

"White broadens our understanding of why we think of the law as we do and deepens our insight into its historical foundations."—Edward Purcell, author of The Crisis of Democratic Theory

From the Publisher