Tort Law
When someone gets hurt, who pays
Every injury leaves a bill: an ambulance ride, a month of missed work, a knee that never fully bends again. The law’s starting point is that the bill stays with the person who got hurt. Tort law is the set of rules for moving it somewhere else, and it moves nothing until it can name a reason the other party should carry it. Those reasons are what this reading is about, because they are what the activity sends you looking for in the news. There are three of them.
A tort is a civil wrong, other than a breach of contract, for which the law provides a remedy, usually money damages. It is private law. The injured person brings the case and the aim is compensation, which is what separates a tort from a crime the state prosecutes. The line between them is not a wall. One punch can be a battery the victim sues over and a crime the state charges, running as two cases on two different standards of proof. Cornell’s Wex entry on tort (opens in a new tab) sets out the same three categories this reading walks through.
Three ways to be responsible
What separates the three categories is the reason the law gives for shifting the loss onto the defendant. The size of the injury does not decide it, and neither does the court the case lands in. Each category offers a different reason, and the facts tell you which one is available.
Start with the intentional tort. The defendant meant to cause the harm, or knew it was substantially certain to follow from the act. Battery, assault, false imprisonment, and defamation all sit here. Because the category runs on state of mind, the size of the harm does not control. Spitting on someone is a battery: the contact was deliberate and offensive, and no bruise is required.
Next, and by far the most common, is negligence. Nobody meant for anything to happen. Someone failed to use the care a reasonable person would have used, and another person got hurt as a result. Car crashes, slip-and-falls, and malpractice claims nearly all run on this theory, which is why the next section takes it apart piece by piece.
Third is strict liability, and it is the odd one, because neither intent nor carelessness matters. The law attaches the loss to the activity itself, on the theory that whoever chooses to run an unusual risk should carry it. It reaches a short list: defective products, abnormally dangerous activities like blasting, and injuries from certain animals. The Wex entry on strict liability (opens in a new tab) collects the situations where it applies. Roughly 36 states have dog-bite statutes (opens in a new tab) making the owner liable whether or not the dog ever showed a hint of danger. If a defendant can lose without any proof of fault, you are looking at strict liability.
Quick check: what a tort is, and the three categories
Four questions on the definition of a tort and how the categories differ. Pick one answer each.
A tort is best defined as:
What separates the three categories of tort from one another?
A store clerk, angry at a customer, shoves him and he stumbles. Which category fits best?
Strict liability is different from the other categories because it:
The anatomy of a negligence claim
Negligence is the one to know cold. It carries most of the caseload, and its four elements work as a checklist you can run against almost any accident. The plaintiff proves all four: that a duty existed, that the defendant breached it, that the breach caused the injury, and that the injury is one the law can compensate. Miss one and the claim fails, however sympathetic the facts. The Wex entry on negligence (opens in a new tab) covers the same ground with five elements, because it lists cause in fact and proximate cause separately.
The first is a duty of care, a legal obligation to act with reasonable care toward others. It is the threshold question, and it is where the most famous negligence case in American law stops. In Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., two railroad guards helping a man onto a moving train knocked a newspaper-wrapped package from his arms. It held fireworks. They exploded on the rails, the blast toppled a set of scales at the far end of the platform, and the scales struck Mrs. Palsgraf. Cardozo wrote for the majority that the guards’ conduct was no wrong to her, because nothing about a small parcel in newspaper warned of danger to someone that far away. No duty, no negligence. Andrews dissented, reading the duty to run to the world at large and putting the real limit on liability in proximate cause. You can read both opinions on CourtListener (opens in a new tab).
With a duty established, breach of duty asks what the defendant actually did, measured against what a reasonable person would have done facing the same risks. Breach is a question about conduct, and nothing else. Causation then ties that conduct to the injury, and it asks two things. Would the harm have happened but for the defendant’s act? And was the harm foreseeable rather than a freak result too remote to charge to anyone? Last comes damages, real harm the law can put a number on, from medical bills and lost wages to pain and suffering. A plaintiff who proves the first three elements and cannot show an injury has won nothing.
Quick check: the four elements of negligence
Four questions on duty, breach, causation, and damages, and on Palsgraf. Pick one answer each.
The four elements a plaintiff must prove in a negligence case are:
In Palsgraf, Cardozo's majority held the railroad was not liable because:
Breach of duty asks whether the defendant:
The causation element of negligence requires the plaintiff to show that:
Find them in the world
A category you can define and cannot apply is worth very little, so work through a few messy facts before you go hunting.
Quick check: sort the story
Three short scenarios. For each, pick the category that fits best.
A driver runs a red light while texting and hits a pedestrian. This is most likely:
A dog with no history of biting gets loose and bites a neighbor. In many states this is:
During an argument, one neighbor deliberately punches another. This is:
In the activity you go find three real stories, one for each category. For each, you name the tort, the party who would answer for it, and the single feature that put it there. Expect the hunt to be lopsided. Negligence is everywhere. Intentional torts surface in coverage of assaults and defamation suits. Strict liability hides, which is why the assignment points you toward recalls, defective-product injuries, and dog bites. It is also why the reflection at the end asks which category was hardest to find.
Two habits matter more than speed. Decide the category yourself before you show an article to an AI, because a model will miscategorize a story in the same confident tone it uses when it is right. And read each article as a claim rather than a record, since what a story leaves out is usually the fact you needed. The activity carries a prompt for each habit, Sorting Check for the first and Source Skeptic for the second. The stories are already published. What changes is that you can see the structure inside them.