Resource Guide to Diversity: Torts

Feminist Perspectives on Tort Law offers a distinctly feminist approach to key topics in tort law. Ten original essays written by feminist legal scholars from the UK, US, Canada and Australia encompass a range of ways of thinking about women, tort law and feminism. The collection provides a fresh and original analysis of issues of long-standing concern to feminists as well as nascent areas of concern. These include conceptions of harm, constructions of reasonableness, the duty of care, the public/private divide, sexual wrongdoing, privacy and environmental law. Written with both scholars and students in mind, Feminist Perspectives on Tort Law is an important and timely addition to key debates in tort law.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation. Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

Tort law is the body of law governing negligence, intentional misconduct, and other wrongful acts for which civil actions can be brought. The conventional wisdom is that the rules, concepts, and structures of tort law are neutral and unbiased, free of considerations of gender and race. In The Measure of Injury, Martha Chamallas and Jennifer Wriggins prove that tort law is anything but gender and race neutral. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of case law ranging from the Jim Crow South to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the authors demonstrate that women and minorities have been under-compensated in tort law and that traditional biases have resurfaced in updated forms to perpetuate patterns of disparate recovery based on race and gender. Grappling with tort theory, the intricacies of legal doctrine and the practical effects of legal rules, The Measure of Injury is a unique treatise on torts that uncovers the public and cultural dimensions of this always-controversial domain of private law.

A practical look at the way racial bias plays out at every level of the legal system, from witness identification and jury selection to prosecutorial behaviour, defence decisions and the way expert witnesses are regarded. Using cutting-edge research from across the social sciences and, in particular, new understandings from psychology of the way prejudice functions in the brain, this new book includes many of the seminal writings to date along with newly commissioned pieces filling in gaps in the present literature.