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Tort Law and the Construction of Change studies the interaction of law and social change in American history. Tort law—civil law made by judges, not legislators—is traditionally thought to arise out of legal precedent. But Kenneth S. Abraham and G. Edward White show that American judges over the course of the previous two centuries also paid close attention to changing societal contexts in which lawsuits for civil injuries arose. They argue that two versions of history–one grounded in the application of previous legal rules and the other responsive to larger societal changes—must be considered in tandem to grasp fully how American civil law has evolved over time. In five fascinating chapters, they cover understudied areas of tort law, such as liability for nonphysical harm—including lawsuits for defamation, privacy, emotional distress, sexual harassment, and the hacking of confidential information—and aspects of tort litigation that have now disappeared, such as the prohibition against \"interested\" parties testifying in civil actions or the intentional infliction of temporal damage without justification. What emerges is a picture of the complicated legal dance American judges performed to cloak their decisions to make at times radical changes in tort law in response to social transformations. When confronting established tort doctrines under pressure from emerging social changes, they found ways to preserve at least the appearance of doctrinal continuity.

This history of tort law in America looks at how the subject has been conceptualized, pointing out why changes in rules occurred, and who did the changing. White approaches his subject from four perspectives: intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, the phenomenon of professionalization in the late 19th and 20th centuries in America, and the recurrent concerns of tort law since it became a discrete field.

For more than four decades beginning in 1944, the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State secretly blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with low-dose ionizing radiation, the byproduct of plutonium production. For those who lived in the vicinity, many of them families of Hanford workers, the consequences soon became apparent as rates of illness and death steadily climbed-despite repeated assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the facility posed no threat. Trisha T. Pritikin, who has battled a lifetime of debilitating illness to become a lawyer and advocate for her fellow \"downwinders,\" tells the devastating story of those who were harmed in Hanford's wake and, seeking answers and justice, were subjected to yet more suffering. At the center of The Hanford Plaintiffs are the oral histories of twenty-four people who joined In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation , the class-action suit that sought recognition of, and recompense for, the grievous injury knowingly caused by Hanford. Radioactive contamination of American communities was not uncommon during the wartime Manhattan Project, nor during the Cold War nuclear buildup that followed. Pritikin interweaves the stories of people poisoned by Hanford with a parallel account of civilians downwind of the Nevada atomic test site, who suffer from identical radiogenic diseases. Against the heartrending details of personal illness and loss and, ultimately, persistence in the face of a legal system that protects the government on all fronts and at all costs, The Hanford Plaintiffs draws a damning picture of the failure of the US Congress and the Judiciary to defend the American public and to adequately redress a catastrophic wrong. Documenting the legal, medical, and human cost of one community's struggle for justice, this book conveys in clear and urgent terms the damage done to ordinary Americans in the name of business, progress, and patriotism.

Opioid litigation continues a growing public health litigation trend in which governments seek to hold companies responsible for population harms related to their products. The litigation can serve to address gaps in regulatory and legislative policymaking and in market self-regulation pervasive in the prescription opioid domain. Moreover, prior opioid settlements have satisfied civil tort litigation objectives of obtaining compensation for injured parties, deterring harmful behavior, and holding certain opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies accountable for their actions. In this way, opioid litigation represents progress over prior public health litigation campaigns involving tobacco, lead paint, and asbestos, which had more limited tort litigation effects. Although opioid litigation is not a comprehensive solution to the opioid crisis, it can complement other strategies and infuse much needed money, behavior changes, and public accountability for prescription opioid and related harms.

[...]this Comment will apply the standard to various groups who have faced disputes over protections under the Civil Rights Conspiracy Statute. THE HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT OF § 1985(3) A. The Ku Klux Klan Act Debated in Congress To rein in the defeated Confederacy and reconstruct the South after the Civil War, the federal government sought more expansive powers to regulate states and the individuals within them.20 Congress's debate over the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 reflects the tensions that stemmed from that expansion.21 Republicans pushed for substantial action22 while conservative Democrats downplayed the Klan's power in an attempt to preserve the status quo.23 Proponents of the Act argued for a broad, sweeping statute that could be used to protect large groups of Americans,24 while opponents sought to preserve the power of state governments.25 The Statute, as originally drafted, expansively defined conspiracies as those \"do[ing] any act\" which violated rights, privileges, or immunities under the Constitution or federal law.26 After three days of debate, Congress proposed a narrower bill, which limited its protection to conspiracies aimed at \"depriving any person, or class of persons, of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws. In 1951, after almost a century of questions about its proper application, the Supreme Court seemingly ended any particular usefulness when it held that the statute did not cover private conspiracies without some state action or attempt to influence government actors.31 The Court reversed course two decades later, in Griffin v. Breckenridge, where it analyzed legislative intent to determine that Congress had intended for the statute to cover private conspiracies.32 This case serves as the bedrock for all future analysis, announcing the Court's main concerns: (1) deference to legislative history; and (2) reconciling the broad sweep of Reconstruction statutes and the constitutional issues associated with the unintentional creation of a general federal tort law.33 The Court limited which private conspiracies the Statute would cover through a requirement of racial animus, or possibly animus aimed at other protected classes.34 In Griffin, the plaintiffs were African Americans who sought to exercise their right to vote-a group so similar to the Reconstruction Congress's primary intended beneficiaries that the Court did not need to discuss whether the Statute protected any other potential classes of plaintiffs.35 In the Court's few subsequent opinions concerning the substantive portions of the Statute, it declined to reach the question of what classes beyond race might be recognized.36 Its decisions in these cases, however, can illustrate some guiding principles. In Great American Federal Savings & Loan Ass'n v. Novotny, the Court rejected a male plaintiff's claim that his employer retaliatorily discharged him in violation of Title VII due to his support for female coworkers.37 The Court held that the Statute is not a source of substantive rights in itself, but merely a mechanism to provide remedies for violations of designated constitutional rights.38 In United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America, Local 610 v. Scott, the Court rejected the claim of a group of non-union workers, who union protestors assaulted at a construction site.39 The non-union workers based their claim on an alleged violation of First Amendment freedom of association protections.40 The Court severely narrowed the Statute, first ruling that First Amendment-based claims required state action, and then holding that classes based on economic activities were not cognizable.41 The restrictive holding indicated skepticism over whether any classes beyond race could be covered.42 Next, in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, the Court declined to recognize a class of women seeking abortions, who claimed that anti-choice demonstrators were conspiring to deprive them of a constitutional right.43 The Court reasoned, without deciding if the statute extended to cover sex discrimination, that a desire to prevent women from getting abortions was not discriminatory animus against the class of women as a whole.44 The Supreme Court's inconsistent analysis has confused lower courts due to the dissonance between a plain text reading of the Statute45 and the Court's reliance on original legislative intent.46 C. Divisions in Lower Federal Courts In the absence of clear guidance from the Supreme Court, lower courts are divided on the question of which classes, beyond race, can receive protection under the Civil Rights Conspiracy Statute.47 Though the underlying rationales for their decisions have varied from class to class, case to case, and circuit to circuit, this Comment groups the divergent standards into broad categories to inject clarity into the debate. 1.

Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, Regulating Desire explores the legal regulation of young women's sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich draws upon a rich array of primary source materials, including reform periodicals, court cases, legislative hearing records, and abstinence curricula to create an interdisciplinary narrative of socially embedded legal change. Capturing the complex and dynamic nature of the relationship between the state and the sexualized youthful female body, she highlights how the law both embodies and shapes gendered understandings of normative desire as mediated by considerations of race and class.

Americans have long been obsessed with their images—their looks, public personas, and the impressions they make. This preoccupation has left its mark on the law. The twentieth century saw the creation of laws that protect your right to control your public image, to defend your image, and to feel good about your image and public presentation of self. These include the legal actions against invasion of privacy, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. With these laws came the phenomenon of \"personal image litigation\"—individuals suing to vindicate their image rights. Laws of Image tells the story of how Americans came to use the law to protect and manage their images, feelings, and reputations. In this social, cultural, and legal history, Samantha Barbas ties the development of personal image law to the self-consciousness and image-consciousness that has become endemic in our media-saturated culture of celebrity and consumerism, where people see their identities as intertwined with their public images. The laws of image are the expression of a people who have become so publicity-conscious and self-focused that they believe they have a right to control their images—to manage and spin them like actors, politicians, and rock stars.

Antitrust law has a race problem. To spot an antitrust violation, courts inquire into whether an act has degraded consumer welfare. Since anti-competitive practices are often assumed to enhance consumer welfare, antitrust offenses are rarely found. Key to this framework is that antitrust treats all consumers monolithically; that consumers are differently situated, especially along lines of race, simply is ignored. We argue that antitrust law must disaggregate the term \"consumer\" to include those who disproportionately suffer from anticompetitive practices via a community welfare standard. As a starting point, we demonstrate that anti-competitive conduct has specifically been used as a tool of oppression while, at other times, minorities are the unintended victims of anti-competitive practices. In turn, this article leans on Critical Race Theory (CRT) to explore ways that antitrust's \"colorblind\" stance has failed communities of color. We also explain why antitrust law is an ideal regime to address systemic racism. Consider that antitrust law is concerned with structures; just as enforcement scrutinizes whether conduct has made a market more or less likely to promote consumer welfare, antitrust should scrutinize whether anti-competitive conduct has made a market more or less likely to benefit all consumers. To put it another way, antitrust's claimed purpose is to enhance consumer welfare by maximizing allocative efficiency, but it ignores how discrimination is similarly inefficient if resources are misallocated along race lines rather than their most productive uses. Finally, by embracing the intellectual backbone of antitrust law as well as CRT's lessons about power structures, we make the case that antitrust's goal should be reimagined to benefit not only the welfare of all consumers but the welfare of communities as well.

This Health Policy Report describes the malpractice system in the United States, examines its shortcomings, and analyzes the forces that have led to past and current malpractice crises. The authors review options for reform of the U.S. malpractice system. Conventional tort reforms include caps on damages, limits on attorneys' fees, and shortening of the statute of limitations. Experts have also proposed major system reforms, such as enterprise liability or administrative compensation. Options for reform of the American malpractice system. Few issues in health care spark as much ire and angst as medical-malpractice litigation. Physicians revile malpractice claims as random events that visit unwarranted expense and emotional pain on competent, hardworking practitioners. Commentators lament the “lawsuit lottery,” which provides windfalls for some patients, but no compensation for the vast majority of patients injured by medical care. 1 , 2 Within the health care industry, there is a nearly universal belief that malpractice litigation has long since surpassed sensible levels and that major tort reform is overdue. Yet the drive to litigate continues. Plaintiffs' attorneys and some consumer groups interpret providers' grievances as . . .