A Century of Change in Personal Injury Law

A Century of Change in Personal Injury Law Stephen D. Sugarman For well more than 100 years, tort law has been a complex body of rules covering a wide range of civil injuries that, at times, have seemed rather unrelated to each other. Indeed, as late as 1900 it was by no means clear that “torts” was even a coherent field of the law or an identifiable subject of separate study.1 Nevertheless, the law of personal injuries has been at the heart of American tort law throughout the 20th century. In this Essay, I will focus primarily on changing personal injury law and the changing personal injuries it handles. More precisely, my Essay will concentrate on accidental injuries. Although much legal doctrine exists that covers intentional personal injuries, in practice at least, personal injury law throughout the 20th century has been fundamentally about accidents.2 The initial theme I want to emphasize is that the last 100 years has seen a significant change in the personal injuries with which tort law deals. This change has been driven by several forces. First, tort law doctrine has been sharply altered. Second, the ability and willingness of accident victims to sue has markedly increased. Third, other forms of regulation have narrowed the role of tort law because of its 1 See generally G. Edward White, Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History 18-19, 38-39, 60-62 (1980). 2 By narrowing my Essay as I have, I do not mean to deny that business torts, for example, are an important area of the law—arguably one of rapidly growing importance today. So, too, tort law plainly deals with personal harms that involve other than physical injuries to the body—including harm to reputation which is protected by the law of defamation, the right to be left alone which is protected by privacy law, and so on. Furthermore, damage to tangible property is clearly a very important part of tort law’s realm, and, of course, many bodily injuries are accompanied by damage to property as well—auto accidents being the exemplar. Nonetheless, because this is a brief essay with a 100 2 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. V:P perceived inadequacy. Fourth, the pattern of accidental bodily injuries is dramatically different today. I take these transformations up in turn. After that, I address several other 20th-century shifts in the back- ground context in which personal injury law sits—the creation of various social insurance arrangements, the development of the regulatory state and its attention to safety issues, and the enormous diversifica- tion in torts scholarship. Having reviewed these many changes, I then summarize how the business of personal injury law today differs from what it was in 1900. In the final sections of this Essay, I explore the questions of how well personal injury law serves our society as we begin the 21st century and what are the prospects for its future reform. I. The Transformation of Personal Injury Law Doctrine Personal injury law doctrine has been altered significantly from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. This transformation has not, however, resulted in the embrace of “strict liability” as many late 20th-century advocates had hoped. Rather, it has been the consolidation of defendant liability around the “fault” principle. year sweep, I have decided to center my attention on accidental bodily injury. I also note that this portion of tort’s work is what most contemporary law school courses on tort law feature. YEAR] SHORT TITLE 3 A. The Failure of “Strict Liability” to Take Hold Especially in the last third of the 20th century, there was much writing in tort law circles on behalf of “enterprise liability.” Guido Calabresi’s work3 played a key role, as did the legal opinions of Roger Traynor.4 In terms of fairness, the basic vision behind “enterprise liability” is that those who choose to engage in business activities and gain the benefits from those activities ought to pay for the accident costs associated with them. Two key instrumental justifications for enterprise ilability are (1) that it prompts commercial actors to carry out their businesses more carefully (the deterrence objective), and (2) that it spreads the financial loss from accidents among all those who buy from the enterprise, rather than concentrating the loss on unlucky victims (the risk-spreading objective). As a doctrinal matter, I believe that “enterprise liability” in its strong form calls for the imposition of “strict liability” or “liability without fault” on commercial sellers of goods, providers of commercial ser- vices, owners of commercial property, and so on. Yet, there has actually been very little acceptance of strict liability in tort as a matter of legal doctrine. Strict liability law today is largely restricted to product injury cases involving manufacturing defects.5 And in that setting, strict liability usually makes little differ- ence. This is because victims typically could win anyway under negligence law, especially in light of the fact that the rule of res ipsa loquitur would commonly be available to them. 3 Guido Calabresi, The Costs of Accidents (1970). 4 Most importantly, see Escola v. Coca Cola Bottling Co. of Fresno, 24 Cal.2d 453, 150 P.2d 436 (1944). 5 See Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability § 2 (1998). 4 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. V:P Strict liability also applies to so-called abnormally dangerous activities, such as injuries caused by dynamite blasting, that occur despite the exercise of due care.6 But, by definition, these extra-hazardous activities and the injuries they cause are uncommon.7 So, while blasting injury and similar cases continue to provide fascination for the torts classroom, they matter little to the day-to-day life of tort law. Scholars like Charles Gregory,8 and Morton Horwitz,9 have argued that during much of the 19th century (and before) tort law was dominated by strict liability. Were that actually so, then the 20th- century transformation in tort doctrine might be described as one in which that prior way of thinking was soundly over-ruled. But I believe that the better reading of the historical record, as shown primarily by the work of Gary Schwartz, is that strict liability was highly unusual before the 20th century as well.10 B. The Consolidation of the Principle of Defendant Liability Based on Fault The central change in personal injury law doctrine that I believe has taken place since 1900 is the evolution of a robust law of negligence. Making defendants take legal responsibility for accidents which they have unreasonably failed to prevent—but only for those accidents—is the core principle of per- 6 See Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 519-20 (1977). 7 See id. at § 520(d) (describing such activities as “not a matter of common usage”). 8 Charles O. Gregory, Trespass to Negligence to Absolute Liability, 37 Va. L. Rev. 359 (1951). 9 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 67-108 (1977). 10 Gary T. Schwartz, Tort Law and the Economy in Nineteenth Century America: A Reinterpretation, 90 Yale L.J. 1717, 1727-34 (1981); Gary T. Schwartz, The Character of Early American Tort Law, 36 UCLA L. Rev. 641 (1989). YEAR] SHORT TITLE 5 sonal injury law today. Interestingly enough, “enterprise liability” thinking has played a role here.11 The fault principle itself is more and more defended on deterrence and risk-spreading grounds, rather than simply on the basis of fairness as between the plaintiff and the defendant. Personal injury law’s coalescence around the fault principle has meant that the substantive law in this area has actually become simplified, a trend Harry Kalven noted three decades ago.12 The most important shift in doctrine since 1900 has been the elimination of many long-standing rules that previously immunized defendants from liability—a theme best explored in an article published twenty years ago by Robert Rabin.13 In the 19th century (and well into the 20th), tort law contained many rules that limited a defendant’s legal duty. Although juries might well have concluded that reasonable precautions were available to defendants that would have avoided harm to victims, judges applied legal doctrines that protected those defendants from liability. By the end of the 20th century, however, this picture had been radically altered. In the first place, many old “no duty” rules have been abandoned. Perhaps most important is the overthrow of the rule that manufacturers owed no duty of care to consumers for harms done to them as a result of negligently-made products, unless the consumer had bought the product directly from the manufacturer (the “privity” requirement)—an uncommon practice in a modern world dominated by in- 11 See Robert L. Rabin, Some Thoughts on the Ideology of Enterprise Liability, 55 Md. L. Rev. 1190 (1996). 12 Harry Kalven, Jr., Tort Law: Negligence on the Move, 33 ATL L.J. 1 (1970); Harry Kalven, Jr., Tort Law: Tort Watch, 34 ATL L.J. 1 (1972). 13 Robert L. Rabin, The Historical Development of the Fault Principle: A Reinterpretation, 15 Ga. L. Rev. 925 (1981). 6 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. V:P dependent retailers. This change in the law began relatively early in the 20th century with Cardozo’s justly famous opinion in the MacPherson case.14 Since then, many other “no duty” rules have also fallen. For example, emotional distress claims no longer require physical touching to be actionable,15 land owners and occupiers are liable to trespassers and social guests in circumstances in which they previously owed those victims no duty of care,16 intra-family immunity (another “no duty” principle) has been widely abandoned,17 and so on.

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