ABSTRACT
In law school curriculum, the first-year tort law course is often caricatured as the class with the funky, sometimes amusing, fact patterns where people get injured – occasionally in bizarre ways – and attempt to recover from the party purportedly responsible. In legal scholarship, tort law has historically been dominated by two approaches: the law and economic approach focused on efficiently distributing the costs of injuries and on preventing/deterring them, and the civil recourse or corrective justice approach that underscores tort law’s role in providing individual redress for victims who have been injured by a wrongdoer.
But thanks to innovative scholars attentive to power disparities in the law and society, an ever-growing body of scholarship analyzes, critiques, and suggests reforms to tort law based on the racial, gender, ableist, socio-economic, and sexuality-based disparities or stereotyping assumptions that exist within the doctrine and its application. Professor Martha Chamallas’s scholarship has been at the vanguard of this important trend and it’s a joy to celebrate her ground-breaking work in this Festschrift, although a tall order to do it justice.
Her intellectual and moral leadership have helped us realize that tort law – no less than constitutional law, civil rights, or criminal law – is a context where power and identities play a critical role in determining whose lives will be valued, whose injuries will be remedied, and what injustices will be rectified. Or not. This work has implications not just for how tort law is interpreted and applied in courts, but also how it is taught in school. In fact, several of Professor Chamallas’s scholarly endeavors focus specifically on bringing these insights to bear on law school curriculum …
Skinner-Thompson, Scott, Anti-Subordination Torts (February 25, 2022). Ohio State Law Journal, volume 83, 2022.
First posted 2022-03-02 16:00:10
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