Tom Baker, ‘What Is Insurance for Tort Law?’, 111 Virginia Law Review (forthcoming 2025), available at SSRN. It is a truth rarely acknowledged by tort theorists that personal injury lawyers in possession of good plaintiffs must also be in want of insured defendants. Tom Baker acknowledges that truth in ‘What is Insurance for Tort Law?’, and follows it to some bracing conclusions. Baker’s article is a welcome rejoinder to Kenneth Abraham and Catherine Sharkey’s recent call to treat insurance as a constitutive part of tort doctrine and practice. Abraham and Sharkey embrace liability insurance as an economically ‘beneficial’ aspect of tort practice that ‘spreads the risk of tort liability, [..] helps to promote safety, ensures compensation for some tort victims who would otherwise not be compensated, and enables planning and budgeting … by potential defendants’. Not so fast, Baker warns … (more)
[Cristina Tilley, JOTWELL, 3 November 2025]
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