‘How to Get Away with Negligence’

Robin L West, Gatsby and Tort, in American Guy: Masculinity In American Law And Literature 86 (Saul Levmore and Martha C Nussbaum ed, 2014), available at SSRN. In Gatsby and Tort, Robin West engagingly argues that Fitzgerald’s famous novel highlights serious shortcomings of tort law as it has been traditionally understood, and of modern efforts to supplant or reconceptualize it. West begins by observing that Gatsby would make for a good torts exam. In its ‘fact-pattern’ one can find bases for claims of battery, fraud, and criminal conversation. There is also a paradigmatic example of negligence — Daisy Buchanan, speeding in Gatsby’s Rolls Royce, runs down Myrtle Wilson. (Myrtle, Tom Buchanan’s mistress, had darted out into the street while escaping her husband George’s efforts to cloister her.) … (more)

[John Goldberg, JOTWELL, 20 October]

First posted 2015-10-20 18:20:03

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