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Business, Defamation, and Privacy Torts, First Edition

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Authors
  • Richard A. Epstein
  • Catherine M. Sharkey
Series / Aspen Casebook Series
BOOKMARK
Book length
560 pages
Publication Date
2025-02-03
Edition
First Edition
Teaching Materials
NO
Description

Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on Casebook Connect, including lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities. Access also includes practice questions, an outline tool, and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes.

Business, Defamation, and Privacy Torts by Richard A. Epstein and Catherine M. Sharkey organizes topics suitable for an advanced, upper division course (or seminar) on Torts.

When and why, if ever, are economic harms—as opposed to physical and emotional harms—recoverable in tort? There are certain breaches of duty for which pecuniary losses must be honored, lest the common law fail in its promise to prevent force and fraud. Just as we all enjoy the right to be free from the threat of physical harm, so too we have the right to receive protection for the ability to make new contracts free from threats of force and force, and to be assured that others will not seek to knowingly induce breach of our existing contracts. Additionally, we also deserve to have our reputation, and those of our goods and services, protected from harmful falsehoods. Also, privacy rights of two sorts also receive protection: first the right to keep personal information about ourselves private, and second to control the use of name and likeness in commercial and business ventures.

The expansion of liability in these areas may at once be novel, dubious, and nonetheless potentially morally and socially desirable. Students must examine the full policy and doctrinal challenges of these debates. Setting selective limits on the recovery of pecuniary losses is how the common law has adapted to economic advancements since its early creation in England. From the Statute of Labourers of 1349 to the artificial intelligence controversies of today, students will be able to grapple with these legal adaptations to social change.

Highlights of the First Edition:
  • Setting forth the “economic loss rule(s)”—where the courts most directly grapple with the question whether and why pecuniary losses must be honored—to organize the study of business torts.
  • Introducing a conceptual framework of “contractual privity” and “stranger” economic loss rules as a way to frame contemporary issues such as data breaches.
  • Focusing on the pressures to expand common law fraud via statutory actions that dispense with such traditional elements as reliance and harm.
  • Highlighting products liability in the modern digital era, assessing whether similar online retailers and distributors are treated as sellers for goods that other parties sell on their websites.
  • Addressing the emergence of public nuisance as modern business tort, exploring its application in opioid and global warming cases.
  • Questioning the continued viability of Communications Decency Act Section 230 immunity for internet service providers in dealing with the spreading calculated falsehoods.
  • Recognizing how an expanded Internet catapults’ data privacy to the forefront of discussion of privacy law.
Professors and students will benefit from:
  • Inclusion of great older cases, both English and American, that have proved themselves time and again in the classroom, and which continue to exert great influence on the modern law.
  • Preservation of both historical and conceptual continuity and transformation between the present and the.
  • Emphasis on alternative visions of tort law—both classical liberal and progressive—as they developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the ever larger footprint of the twenty-first century.
  • Updating traditional material to keep pace with new technological developments, which occur both through common law and, increasingly, through legislation and regulation.
Teaching materials include:
  • Comprehensive Teachers’ Manual
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About the authors
Richard A. Epstein
New York University School of Law

Richard A. Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a visiting law professor at NYU from 2007 through 2009. He has served as the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000. Epstein is also the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. His initial law school appointment was at the University of Southern California from 1968 to 1972. Epstein received an LL.D., h.c. from the University of Ghent, 2003. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and has been a Senior Fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School, also since 1983. He served as editor of the Journal of Legal Studies from 1981 to 1991, and of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1991 to 2001. From 2001 to 2010, he was a director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago.

His books include The Case Against the Employee Free Choice Act (Hoover 2009); Supreme Neglect: How to Revive the Constitutional Protection of Property Rights (Oxford 2008); Antitrust Decrees in Theory and Practice: Why Less is More (AEI 2007); Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation (Yale University Press 2006); How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution (Cato 2006); Cases and Materials on Torts (Aspen Publishing, 8th ed. 2004); Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (University of Chicago, 2003); Torts (Aspen Publishing 1999); Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (Perseus Books, 1998); Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Rights to Health Care (Addison-Wesley, 1997); Simple Rules for a Complex World (Harvard, 1995); Bargaining With the State (Princeton, 1993); Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard, 1992); Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Harvard, 1985); and Modern Products Liability Law (Greenwood Press, 1980). He has also edited Cases and Materials on the Law of Torts (9th edition 2008).

Catherine M. Sharkey
New York University School of Law

Catherine Sharkey is one of the nation's leading scholars on punitive damages and federal preemption in the realm of products liability. She has published more than twenty-five law review articles, essays, reviews, and book chapters in the fields of tort, administrative law, mass torts, class actions, and empirical legal studies. Professor Sharkey earned a bachelor's degree in economics, summa cum laude, from Yale University. She was captain of Yale's lacrosse team, a member of the U.S. national women's lacrosse team, and named to the All-American Women's Lacrosse team.

A Rhodes Scholar, she received a master of science in economics for development, with distinction, from Oxford University (Magdalen College), and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. She then worked as a Supreme Court and appellate litigation associate at Mayer Brown before joining the faculty of Columbia Law School. She became a Professor of Law at NYU in 2007.
Product Information
Edition
First Edition
Publication date
2025-02-03
Copyright Year
2025
Pages
560
Connected eBook with Study Center + Hardcover
9798892075572
Connected eBook with Study Center (Digital Only)
9798892075589
Subject
Tort Law, Elective
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