The Wide World of Torts: Reviewing Franklin & Rabin's Tort Law And
CASEBOOK REVIEW The Wide World of Torts: Reviewing Franklin & Rabin's Tort Law and Alternatives Bernard W. Bell* Tort Law and Alternatives authored by Stanford Law School pro- fessors Marc Franklin and Robert Rabin, and recently released in its Seventh Edition, continues to serve as an excellent casebook.' To paraphrase the introduction to the American Broadcasting Company's popular sports anthology, the Wide World of Sports, the casebook spans the country2 to bring students the constant variety of tort litiga- tion.3 Tort law is, in a sense, very traditional-late 19th and early 20th century caselaw provides much of its foundation and many of the ba- sic doctrines have long been settled. At the same time, tort law un- dergoes continuous metamorphosis. Franklin and Rabin have man- aged to maintain a good balance between the old chestnuts, such as * Professor, Rutgers Law School (Newark). I attended Stanford Law School (Class of 1981) and was a student in Marc Franklin's Torts class. 1. MARC A. FRANKLIN & ROBERT L. RABIN, TORT LAW AND ALTERNATIVES: CASES AND MATERIALS (7th ed. 2001). 2. In earlier editions of the casebook, the authors predominantly used cases from New York and California state courts. With each edition, the authors have progressively added geographic variety so that the principal cases increasingly come from jurisdictions other than New York and California. In the seventh edition, the authors have added cases from jurisdictions whose cases were not represented among those featured as principal cases in the sixth edition. Id. at 18 (Utah), 24 (Texas), 95 (Florida), 110 (Rhode Island), 186 (Washington), 198 (Nebraska), 207 (Louisiana), 215 (Arizona), 359 (New Mexico), 399, 917 (Iowa), 452 (Oklahoma), 476 (South Carolina), 632 (New Hampshire), 876 (North Dakota).
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