This leading casebook covers all major aspects of tort law with expertly edited cases and original text. The principal focus of this book is the law of negligence, strict liability, and no-fault legislation as alternative approaches to compensating the victims of accidental harm and creating optimal incentives for safety. The chapter on intentional torts has been restructured to facilitate its use to start off the course for those instructors desiring to do so. The book also includes comprehensive chapters on products liability, damages and insurance, defamation, privacy, economic torts, and a revamped and updated chapter on alternatives to tort law, including the "tort reforms" of the past half century. Notes and questions following principal cases are designed to supplement students' knowledge about the subject matter of the case and related areas as well as to encourage them to think critically about judicial opinions and tort policy. This Eleventh Edition reflects evolving developments in recent case law and legislative activity, as well as materials and commentary ranging from the soon-to-be completed Third Restatement project on Intentional Torts to continuing tort issues arising from the Internet to important civil justice issues of the day.

This book adopts a novel approach to resolving the present difficulties experienced by the courts in imposing strict liability for the tort of another. It looks beyond the traditional classifications of 'vicarious liability' and 'liability for breach of a non-delegable duty of care' and, for the first time, seeks to explain all instances of strict liability for the tort of another in terms of the various relationships in which the courts impose such liability. The book shows that, despite appearances, there is a unifying feature to the various relationships in which the courts currently impose strict liability for the tort of another. That feature is authority. Whenever the courts impose strict liability for the tort of another, the defendant is either vested with authority over the person who committed a tort against the claimant or has vested or conferred a form of authority upon that person in respect of the claimant. This book uses this feature of authority to construct a new expositive framework within which strict liability for the tort of another can be understood.

Little attention has been paid to the development of Australian private law throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Using the law of tort as an example, Mark Lunney argues that Australian contributions to common law development need to be viewed in the context of the British race patriotism that characterised the intellectual and cultural milieu of Australian legal practitioners. Using not only primary legal materials but also newspapers and other secondary sources, he traces Australian developments to what Australian lawyers viewed as British common law. The interaction between formal legal doctrine and the wider Australian contexts in which that doctrine applied provided considerable opportunities for nuanced innovation in both the legal rules themselves and in their application. This book will be of interest to both lawyers and historians keen to see how notions of Australian identity have contributed to the development of an Australian law.