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Some have seen the doctrine of proximate cause as an especially incoherent feature of negligence law. This Article demonstrates that the doctrine is far more regular than many have supposed. Proximate cause is really two doctrines at the same time, one directed toward cases with multiple causes and another directed toward cases with multiple risks. Each doctrine includes distinct paradigms...

The last several decades of tort scholarship in this country reflect enthusiasm favoring strict enterprise liability as the end position toward which American tort law, appropriately enough, is moving. This Article argues that no such trend is underway; negligence does now, and will in the future, dominate tort. Professor Gary Schwartz reached these same conclusions ii a body of work spanning...

This Article pays tribute to Gary Schwartz and other American tort scholars and judges for their contribution to the development of a distinctive Canadian tort law. Several examples of the direct influence of American tort law on Canadian jurisprudence are described as well as some instances where Canadian tort law has resisted the allure of U.S. developments.

According to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medial errors are not so much caused by the carelessness of individual physicians, nurses, or other hospital personnel. Rather they are the result of cumulative opportunities for human error inevitable in today's complex medical system. The ICM report calls for shifting attention away from the faults of...

This Article examines the historical scholarship of Gary Schwartz, spanning the Industrial Revolution to the late twentieth century. Schwartz set out to show that the fault principle had far deeper historical roots, both before and during the Industrial Revolution, than prominent American tort scholarship recognized-and correspondingly, that late twentieth-century tort law developments in many...

Despite calls for the abolition of assumption of risk, and for its merger within comparative fault, the doctrine survives in some jurisdictions, and its spirit endures in most, if not all. The consensual rationale underlying assumption of risk is distinctive, important, and not easily reducible to the paradigm of victim fault. That rationale helps shape many of the no-duty and limited-duty rules...

In common law jurisdictions outside the United States, Gary Schwartz was the most highly regarded American torts scholar of his time, not least because of the similarity of his approach to the approach adopted by the vast majority of common law scholars outside the United States. This case-law-focused middle theory seeks to promote legal reasoning that is precise, internally coherent, and...

Tort doctrine is both unduly complex and insufficiently developed. Here are some examples. Intentional wrongdoing and product injuries are now treated as discrete areas of the law, rather than being folded into the basic fields of fault-based liability and strict liability. General criteria for determining when one does or doesn't owe another a "duty" in tort are underdeveloped. Inadequate...

This Article considers, from the standpoint of corrective justice, Gary Schwartz's suggestion that tort law should be understood through a mixed theory that affirms both corrective justice and deterrence. When corrective justice and deterrence are both treated as determinants of tort norms, such a mixed theory is impossible, given that corrective justice treats the parties relationally and...

The Fifth Amendment's Just Compensation Clause is a revealing reflection of the Framers' vigilance in preserving property rights and maintaining a balance of power between citizen and state, especially in the specific context of eminent domain. The principle that the state should be generally forbidden from taking private property for public use without just compensation is a leading motif in the...