Tort Liability

Torts are involuntary seizures of entitlements of a certain kind in a particular exchange environment, and tort liability attempts to ensure that tortfeasors compensate their victims for the costs these takings impose. Liability is the law’s answer to externality. It doesn’t seek to deter torts absolutely, but to control them through the principle of corrective justice, which separates efficient from inefficient torts by liability prices and deters only the latter. This chapter examines how these involuntary exchanges are governed by tort liability to do corrective justice and imperfectly completed through individual and class action tort suits for compensatory damages. Tort liability is shown to effectively encourage efficient torts, in which the value of the unlawful cost imposition to the tortfeasor exceeds the external costs of the tort, and thus provide a means to move entitlements to higher-valuing owners in an environment of involuntary takings by private takers.