Private Law Theory

Introduction:
… The history of these so-called ‘personality torts’ has received little scholarly attention. Existing scholarship in this area has focused mostly on present-day doctrine; there has been little work on broader questions of causation and origins. To this end, this Article offers a possible historical explanation for the development of these personality torts. It argues that the emergence of these torts can be seen as a response to a social reorientation taking place between roughly 1880 and 1910 — a change in the way people constructed their social identities and were known to one another … (more)

Samantha Barbas, ‘The Social Origins of the Personality Torts’. Rutgers University Law Review vol 67:393 (2015).

First posted 2015-09-03 11:37:00