Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Abstract
A few authors have performed autopsies on specific torts and identified the suspected reasons behind their deaths. These analyses, though interesting, are by their own admission of limited scope and do not provide especially useful analytic or predictive tools. This Article has a broader goal. Just as pathologists and epidemiologists study how fatal illnesses spread, conservation biologists examine why animal species go extinct, and geographers and anthropologists try to understand why societies succeed or fail, this Article surveys the roster of dead and dying torts and then asks (and tries to answer) a novel question: Why do torts die? This question quickly breaks down into several other queries, of which the following are just a few: Do defunct tort theories share a common fatal flaw? Do torts die for reasons of substance, procedure, or some combination of both? What roles do courts, legislatures, and plaintiffs each play in the deaths of torts? And what, if anything, can the disappearance of some tort theories tell us about what makes other claims survive and prosper?
This Article proposes some answers to these questions. The discussion below offers and develops a framework for analyzing why torts die that focuses upon the contributions made by the following six factors: (1) the changes in the cultural atmosphere surrounding a tort; (2) the quality of the arguments directed against the tort; (3) the interests, abilities, and limitations of the audiences that entertain and act upon these arguments; (4) the influence exerted by the agents who advocate or oppose the elimination of the tort; (5) the attractiveness of alternatives, if any, that may exist to tort liability; and (6) the attributes of the tort itself that make it more or less susceptible to abolition or abandonment. When tested through case studies, this model suggests that torts die when atmosphere, arguments, audiences, agents, alternatives, and attributes combine to direct a tort toward abolition, abandonment, or both. Put another way, most bygone torts have not died simply because times changed. Changing times, or other ambient conditions of the environment in which a tort operates, may prove lethal to a tort if and when they produce arguments against the cause of action that are properly attuned to the interests, concerns, and capabilities of the agents and audiences who endorse or reject theories of liability, and the attributes of the tort and any available alternatives accelerate, rather than defuse, the drive toward abolition or abandonment. Where these factors are not properly aligned, a tort may prove capable of tacking into the prevailing cultural winds.
Automated Citation
35 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 359 (2007)