ABSTRACT
Tort law, we are told, is always and inevitably about money. That is what plaintiffs want. That is what plaintiffs’ lawyers fight to secure. That is what the law is equipped to deliver.
That account is wrong – or at least radically incomplete. Drawing on nearly ninety interviews with plaintiffs, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and defense counsel, we identify and analyze a neglected phenomenon we call the injunctive effect of tort law. We find that, out of the limelight, plaintiffs and defendants forge settlements wherein plaintiffs agree to surrender a portion of their recovery for the defendant’s binding commitment to change its policies, practices, or products. Via these settlements, trucking companies update equipment; cities and counties reconfigure roads; manufacturers redesign – or sometimes pull – products; and hospitals, hotels, prisons, churches, police departments, and schools revise staffing, training, and oversight.
Our illumination of this phenomenon challenges bedrock assumptions about tort law’s operation and effect. To see the injunctive effect of tort law is to blur the distinction between adjudication and regulation. It is to reconceptualize plaintiffs, not merely as rights-holders, entitled to redress, but as energetic reformers capable of directing – and specifying – corporate and governmental conduct. And it is to glimpse a system that offers not only recognition and recompense, but also purpose, agency, and empowerment.
Engstrom, Nora Freeman and Qian, Lisa, The Injunctive Effect of Tort Law (September 22, 2026).
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