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Basic Tort Law is a comprehensive introduction to intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability including the fundamental issues of duty, breach, causation, and compensation.

Offering comprehensive coverage that is suitable for one- or two-semester torts courses, Basic Tort Law: Cases, Statutes, and Problems, Seventh Edition’s flexible organization accommodates courses that begin either with coverage of intentional torts in Chapter 2 or negligence, beginning with Chapter 3. Chapters 9-16 allow teachers to select additional topics that fit best with their curriculum and interests. The robust Teachers Manual includes sample syllabi for both approaches. 

New to the Seventh Edition: 

• A thoroughly revamped chapter on professional liability and the use of expert witnesses. This chapter focuses on which defendants are held to a professional standard of care and when experts are required to establish both the standard of care and causation. It distinguishes cases where expert testimony is required because of the complexity of the subject matter. It focuses on what the content of experts’ testimony must be and the consequences of failing to offer expert testimony. 

• The liability of medical and legal professionals is separated from the discussion of other professionals, to make it easier to teach, to present a more modern treatment of the topics, and to explore the special issues arising in medical and legal liability cases. Old cases have been replaced by six new cases in the three sections covering the liability of medical and legal professionals and others. 

• A new perspective note in Chapter 3 describing recent research on whether jury decision-making aligns with the cost-benefit analysis reflected in the Learned Hand formula, an updated note in Chapter 11 including discussion of expansive approaches to defining the special relationships that can give rise to duties to aid or protect, and updated statutes throughout the book. 

Professors and students will benefit from: 

These general features help first-year teachers and students achieve their goals: 

● Cases are edited to moderate length, so professors can help students analyze judicial reasoning and treatment of policy implications. 

● Many statutes are included to allow students to learn to read statutes and to see how important statutes are in tort issues. 

● Students find the book easy to learn from, because each case has clear introductory text and is followed by clear, and not too numerous, notes. 

● There are many problems, mostly in essay format, to test student understanding of every topic in the book. For each topic, there is at least one practice-oriented problem designed to illustrate the variety of contexts in which lawyers confront doctrinal issues. Problems are usually drawn from reported decisions and include citations to those decisions.