ABSTRACT
Tort law is conventionally understood as a blunt, backward-looking, money-moving instrument. On the standard account, tort law promotes safety – if at all – by forcing defendants to internalize the costs of accidents. Money, in other words, is the sine qua non of tort’s deterrent effect – the system’s engine, and beating heart.
This Article challenges that view. Drawing on a trove of new evidence – including previously undisclosed settlement agreements, deposition transcripts, and internal corporate records, as well as original survey data and nearly ninety in-depth interviews with plaintiffs’ lawyers, defense lawyers, expert witnesses, and injured clients – we show that tort law can do far more than shift dollars. Instead, by stimulating organizational learning, surfacing hidden risks, activating legislators and regulators, and binding actors to new rules of conduct, tort law governs.
To see this wider landscape is to see a tort system that looks far less like a crude pricing device and far more like a multifaceted – and, at times, expressly altruistic – engine of institutional reform. This new perspective – based on a raft of new information – ought to expand the views of those who study the tort system. And, perhaps more importantly, it ought to inform the day-to-day work of those who represent the people the system seeks to help.
Engstrom, Nora Freeman and Qian, Lisa, How Tort Law Drives Change (October 9, 2026).
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