The Best Torts Law Books 2025

1. The Liability Century (Hardcover)

Kenneth Abraham explores the development and interdependency of the tort liability regime and the insurance system in the United States during the twentieth century and beyond, including the events of September 11, 2001. From its beginning late in the nineteenth century, the availability of liability insurance led to the creation of new forms of liability, heavily influenced expansion of the liabilities that already existed, and continually promoted increases in the amount of money that was awarded in tort suits. A "liability-and-insurance spiral" emerged, in which the availability of liability insurance encouraged the imposition of more liability, and, in turn, the imposition of liability encouraged the further spread of insurance. Liability insurance was not merely a source of funding for ever-greater amounts of tort liability. Liability insurers came to dominate tort litigation. They defended lawsuits against their policyholders, and they decided which cases to settle, fight, or appeal. The very idea behind insurance--that spreading losses among large numbers of policyholders is desirable--came to influence the ideology of tort law. To serve the aim of loss spreading, liability had to expand. Today the tort liability and insurance systems constantly interact, and to reform one the role of the other must be fully understood.

The Liability Century (Hardcover)

2. Tort Wars, (Paperback)

Tort Wars brings together the diverse and usually insufficiently related strands of tort law and treats the moral, economic, and systemic problems running through those strands with a single analysis and theory. In that tort law employs theory at all, it is typically theory measured against notions of corrective justice or appeals to utility. Both have severe prescriptive restrictions and limited explanatory power and often stray from any useful description of tort cases in the courts. Tort Wars looks at the nature of dispute resolution techniques, criticizes the blasé justice and more esoteric utility theory, and examines the problems of both the legal academy and the veracity vacuum in the courtroom. Further, it explores the conceptual differences between tort and contract, locating contract as a subset of tort. It uses examples drawn from the edges of tort law in an attempt to measure central cases by the marginal ones and to provide a barometer of emerging legal and social change, achieved through imposing an individualized peace.

Tort Wars, (Paperback) Author: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521721738 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2008-04-21 Page Count: 260