Tort Law: Cases & Critique

Students may also buy a hard copy at the UGA Bookstore

Torts is a mandatory class in every law school that I know. It’s taught all around the country, year after year, usually with substantial similarity in the topics—and even the cases—that professors cover. This makes a good deal of sense. After all, tort law is a key part of every bar exam and one of the building blocks of American legal education, so it’s unsurprising that Torts syllabi don’t budge much over time. Pedagogical consistency can be a virtue.

But despite the stability of the classic Torts curriculum, students must usually buy extortionate casebooks. I say this from a position of personal experience and culpability: my professors made me buy pricey books for my doctrinal classes as a student, and I demanded the same of my students when teaching for the first time in 2020. This ancient law-school tradition creates huge financial burdens during a time when many students are already shouldering colossal debt to pay for tuition and living expenses.

A few hundred bucks for a Torts casebook might seem paltry compared to the overall costs of a legal education, but the expense can still pose significant financial hardships for individual students. And when the costs are aggregated, the numbers are staggering. The book I once used costs $322, meaning my students would collectively spend over $20,000 on Torts alone (used copies still cost over $200). Multiply that by six to cover the standard first-year doctrinal curriculum, and that’s over $125,000 for the sixty-five 1Ls I teach. Expand it to the entire 1L class, and it’s more than $375,000. That’s over $1 million across the three years of students currently enrolled at my school. All that for mandatory first-year casebooks that look remarkably similar to the tomes I bought as a 1L nearly a decade ago.

It’s true that some students recoup a bit by reselling books. But this partial remedy again produces inequities. The need to find willing buyers creates uncertainty in how students can use their casebooks, limiting their ability to highlight, annotate, or engage with the material in ways they find educationally beneficial. Only students privileged enough to keep their old books can do as they please. Renting books presents similar constraints, as does relying on the free library copies that some students feel compelled to use. And to cap it all off, the resale market is regularly disrupted by the publication of new editions.

I don’t mean to be naïve or one-sidedly critical of traditional casebooks (and that’s not just because they’re used—and even authored—by many of the people who’ll soon judge my tenure file!). As I’ve found, making a casebook is taxing and time-consuming work. Not everyone has the support or interest to make their own materials. It’s tempting, and indeed understandable, to rely on the expertise and work of generations of professors who’ve created resources of great value. But if there’s a path to making legal education less daunting and more inclusive, I believe we as teachers should pursue it.

My goal in creating this casebook is to do my part to make legal education more affordable, accessible, and adaptable. That’s why I’m making the book available to all for free. By using a CC BY-NC license, I’m also inviting others to adapt these materials for their own use, so long as they adhere to the non-commerciality and attribution terms. (Anyone interested in “remixing” this book for their own purposes should feel free to contact me at tek@uga.edu, including if you’d like a more adaptable non-PDF version.)

You’re welcome to print any part of this casebook if you want a hard copy to accompany the digital version. If you do print it, I ask that you please use double-sided pages. Because the digital version can be easily searched, it contains no index or other finding aids that are conventional for printed books. You should also be able to enhance your experience with the digital version by highlighting text, adding comments, and annotating it in other ways you find helpful.

You may also purchase a hard copy for around $30 here or at the UGA Bookstore. This linen-wrapped hardback version is made and distributed by Lulu, and I make no revenue from any sales.

To see the syllabus accompanying this casebook, please visit www.thomaskadri.com/torts.

Giving Back

If you use this casebook, I hope you’ll consider donating some of the money you’ll save to one of the following causes (or another cause of your choosing):

Fundo Brasil, which promotes human rights in Brazil. The organization channels resources to civil society organizations that assist vulnerable populations, including initiatives to support indigenous peoples and rights to land and natural resources.
Project Safe, which works in and around the Athens community to tackle domestic violence. Project Safe’s executive director is also a Georgia Law alum!
Project South, which seeks to combat racial and economic injustice by cultivating social movements in the South. The organization has deep ties in South Atlanta, where it’s empowering communities to respond to structural racism.
Union of Concerned Scientists, which relies on science to solve our planet’s pressing problems. The group of nearly 250 scientists and experts is combatting climate change and developing sustainable ways to feed, power, and transport ourselves.

Editing

Throughout this casebook, I’ve prioritized readability over strict loyalty to the original texts. For example, I liberally removed or amended some citations, quotation marks, headings, ellipses, brackets, and footnotes. While I used ellipses to indicate my own substantive omissions, I didn’t always mark other edits. The casebook is designed as a pedagogical resource; if you wish to engage with the materials for other purposes, I’d recommend consulting the original sources.

I’ve tried to include content warnings throughout this casebook, recognizing that certain topics are especially likely to induce trauma or distress. While I’ve done my best to flag these particularly unsettling materials, tort law regularly challenges us to confront difficult and disturbing issues in ways I can’t always predict in advance. If you ever feel that a content warning would’ve been valuable to you but was lacking, I welcome that feedback. Indeed, I welcome any reactions to this casebook, so please reach out if you think important perspectives are missing or if you find errors or typos. I surely have blind spots in the way I present some topics, plus I lack a professional editor to catch my linguistic blunders. You can contact me with any constructive criticism.

Acknowledgments

I created this casebook with support from a University of Georgia Provost’s Affordable Course Materials Grant. I owe huge debts of gratitude to Sarah Burns, Larkin Carden, Katie Davis, Courtney Hogan, Noah Nix, and Davis Wright—their work has been invaluable, and I thank them for their care and brilliance. I truly couldn’t have published this edition without them. For licensing advice and assistance in gathering source materials, I thank Stephen Wolfson and Tiffany Au at the Alexander Campbell King Law Library. Enrique Armijo offered generous tips in selecting defamation and privacy cases, while Margo Schlanger graciously let me adapt her materials on the “reasonable woman” standard. My thanks also to James Grimmelmann, whose own affordable casebook, Internet Law: Cases and Problems, was inspirational to me.

My approach to teaching tort law is also shaped by the casebook I used as a student—Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress, now co-authored by John Goldberg, Leslie Kendrick, Anthony Sebok, and Benjamin Zipursky, whose approaches to torts pedagogy and scholarship I greatly admire. When I taught this course for the first time, I also greatly benefited from the advice and materials I received from Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Rebecca Crootof, Woodrow Hartzog, Claudia Haupt, Don Herzog, Douglas Kysar, Andrew Selbst, Jed Shugerman, Elizabeth Weeks, Mike Wells, and John Fabian Witt.

Lastly, I’m immensely grateful to Scott Hershovitz, who made me love Torts as my professor in 2012 and then guided me as I taught it for the first time.