Fault Lines: Tort Law as Cultural Practice

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Stanford University Press

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.

Reviews:

"Fault Lines presents an original look at how popular culture informs legal practice, and how this influence determines the way a society thinks about and deals with wrongdoing and personal injury." – Timothy Lytton, Albany Law School

"Unified in its attention to tort law in action, this breakthrough volume incorporates years of independent, original research from leading scholars. With clear, comparative examples, it reveals how changes in tort law practices relate to larger social changes." – Richard Abel, UCLA School of Law