Tort Law
Why it Matters
Tort law decides who answers for an injury. A car crash, a punch in a bar, a fall in a store, a product that catches fire. Each is a civil wrong, and the law sorts it into a category before it holds anyone responsible. Learn those categories and a news story about an injury starts to show the legal structure underneath it, the same structure behind most disputes that never make the news. These rules came out of English common law over centuries and legislatures keep adjusting them, but the question under them never moves: who owed what to whom?
Current Context
On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court held 7-2 in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell that federal pesticide law preempts a state failure-to-warn claim demanding a cancer warning the EPA never approved (opens in a new tab). Durnell had won a $1.25 million Missouri verdict on the theory that Monsanto should have warned that Roundup could cause cancer (opens in a new tab), and the state court of appeals affirmed it. Justice Jackson dissented, reading the preemption clause more narrowly and warning that the decision leaves Durnell with no remedy for the harm he suffered (opens in a new tab). Durnell shows the limit of the sorting you do in Part 3. You can name the tort and the responsible party correctly and still watch the claim vanish, because Congress had already handed the label to the EPA.
Key Concepts
Tort
A civil wrong, other than a breach of contract, for which the law provides a remedy, usually money damages. Tort law compensates a private harm; criminal law punishes an offense against the state. One act can do both: a punch is a battery the victim sues over and a crime the state prosecutes.
Intentional Tort
A harm the defendant meant to cause, or knew was substantially certain to follow from the act. Battery, assault, false imprisonment, and defamation all live here. The category turns on the defendant’s state of mind, so a shove meant to hurt qualifies even when the bruise is minor.
Negligence
A harm caused by carelessness rather than intent: the defendant failed to use the care a reasonable person would have used in the same situation. It is the most common category of tort, covering car crashes, slip-and-falls, and malpractice. Nobody meant for it to happen, and someone is still responsible.
Strict Liability
Liability imposed without regard to intent or carelessness, because the activity itself is treated as carrying its own risk. It reaches a few defined situations: defective products, abnormally dangerous activities like blasting, and injuries from certain animals. Roughly 36 states make dog owners liable by statute whether or not the owner was careful.
Duty of Care
A legal obligation to act with reasonable care toward others. In a negligence case it is the threshold question: did the defendant owe this injured person a duty at all? Palsgraf turns on exactly that.
Breach of Duty
A failure to meet the required standard of care, measured against what a reasonable person would have done in the same situation. Breach is about conduct: what the defendant did, or failed to do, given the risks a reasonable person would have seen.
Causation
The link between the defendant’s conduct and the plaintiff’s injury, and it asks two things. Would the harm have happened but for the defendant’s act? And was the harm a foreseeable result rather than a freak consequence too remote to support liability?
Damages
The harm the plaintiff suffered and the money meant to make up for it. Damages cover measurable losses like medical bills and lost wages, and harder ones to price, like pain and suffering. A negligence claim with no actual injury never gets off the ground.
Resources
- Tort, Wex Legal Dictionary (Cornell Legal Information Institute) (opens in a new tab) (Defines a tort and lays out the three categories; start here in Part 1.)
- Negligence, Wex Legal Dictionary (Cornell Legal Information Institute) (opens in a new tab) (Walks the negligence elements you will run against fact patterns, listing causation as two: cause in fact and proximate cause.)
- Strict Liability, Wex Legal Dictionary (Cornell Legal Information Institute) (opens in a new tab) (Explains liability without fault and where it applies, from defective products to abnormally dangerous activities.)
- Dog-Bite Statute, Wex Legal Dictionary (Cornell Legal Information Institute) (opens in a new tab) (A concrete strict-liability example for the news hunt; roughly 36 states impose owner liability by statute.)
- Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., 162 N.E. 99 (N.Y. 1928) (CourtListener) (opens in a new tab) (The classic duty and foreseeability opinion; Cardozo’s majority and Andrews’s dissent sit on the same page.)
What to Do
Tort law is easiest to learn where it actually happens, in ordinary events that end badly. You will learn the three categories and the four elements of negligence, then read one foundational case. After that you go hunting: real news stories that show each category, with the likely tort and the responsible party named. The skill is recognition, seeing the legal structure inside an everyday event.
Part 1: Learn the Categories
Read the Cornell LII entries on tort, negligence, and strict liability. By the end you should be able to say in your own words what a tort is and how the three categories differ. Know negligence best, because its four elements come up again and again: duty, breach, causation, damages. Then run the Category Coach prompt to quiz yourself on the distinctions, especially the line between an intentional tort and negligence, which is where most people first go wrong.
Part 2: Read One Case
Read the Palsgraf opinion on CourtListener. It is short, famous, and turns on one question. Guards helping a passenger board knocked a package onto the rails; it held fireworks, the fireworks exploded, and the blast toppled scales that struck Mrs. Palsgraf far down the platform. Did the railroad owe her a duty? Watch how Cardozo’s majority answers through foreseeability and how Andrews’s dissent reads duty more broadly. Run the Case Companion prompt to test your reading against the text, not to have the case summarized for you.
Part 3: Find Torts in the News
This is the core of the activity. Find three recent news articles, one for each category: an intentional tort, a negligence case, and a strict liability situation. No filed lawsuit is required. A story about an injury, an accident, an assault, a product recall, or a dog attack is enough. Negligence will be easy, intentional torts turn up in coverage of assaults and defamation, and strict liability is the hard one, so look for defective-product injuries, recalls, or dog-bite stories. For each article, name the likely tort, the party who would be responsible, and the one feature that puts it in that category. That feature is the defendant’s intent, their carelessness, or the no-fault nature of the activity. Before you lean on an article, run it through the Source Skeptic prompt to see what the reporting leaves out. Commit to your own answer first, then run the Sorting Check prompt against it, because the AI will sometimes miscategorize a story with complete confidence.
Part 4: Write It Up
Write a discussion post of 300 to 500 words presenting your three articles. For each one, link the story, name the tort and the responsible party, and give a sentence or two on what put it in that category. Close with a short reflection. Which category was hardest to find a clean example of, and what does that difficulty tell you about how often each kind of tort shows up in ordinary life?
Part 5: Share Chat Link
Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.
Suggested AI Prompts
Use these prompts as a starting point, then adjust them to fit your goal. Strong prompting develops through trial, revision, and testing. It’s a foundational skill that grows into more advanced AI work such as context engineering and agent-based workflows.
Category Coach
I am an introductory law student learning the three categories of tort: intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability. Quiz me. Give me one short, realistic situation at a time, with no labels, and ask me which category it fits and why. After each answer, tell me whether I am right, explain the reasoning, and pay special attention to cases on the line between an intentional tort and negligence, since that distinction is the one I most need to get sharp. Keep going until I have correctly sorted at least two examples from each category.
Active recall is the move: you classify a situation and get corrected on the spot, which fixes a distinction far better than reading the definition again. Pointing the model at the intentional-versus-negligence boundary aims the drill at the one place beginners reliably slip.
Case Companion
I have just read the opinion in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 162 N.E. 99 (N.Y. 1928). I am going to tell you, in my own words, the facts, what the court held, and how Cardozo’s majority and Andrews’s dissent disagree about whether the railroad owed Mrs. Palsgraf a duty. After I do, point out anything I got wrong or left out and cite the part of the opinion that supports your correction. Do not summarize the case before I respond.
This is Socratic elicitation: the model holds its answer until you commit to yours, so the AI becomes a comprehension check instead of a substitute for reading. Making it cite the opinion for every correction anchors the feedback in what Cardozo and Andrews actually wrote.
Sorting Check
I am going to paste a news article and tell you which tort category I think it fits (intentional, negligence, or strict liability), the responsible party, and the one feature that put it there. Evaluate my reasoning: say whether you agree, explain why or why not, and flag if the facts could plausibly support a different category. Do not tell me the answer before I give mine, and if the article does not contain enough facts to be sure, say so rather than guessing.
Evaluator framing: the model only reacts to your classification, never writes one, so the analysis stays yours. Telling it to name a plausible competing category, and to say when the facts are too thin, keeps a confident answer from passing as a supported one.
Source Skeptic
I found this news article for my tort assignment, pasted below. Before I rely on it, help me check it. Tell me what kind of source this is, whether it is reporting facts or opinion, and what important details it leaves out that I would need to confirm the tort and the responsible party. Do not accept the article’s framing automatically; point out anything an attorney would want verified before drawing a conclusion.
This one is verification practice: the article arrives as a claim to be tested, not a fact to be trusted. That is the same discipline you owe the model’s own output, and what a source leaves out usually tells you more than what it prints.