A Lost Search for a Generic Tort Action Protecting “Peace of Mind”

Abstract

Abstract I plan to spend most of my time today setting forth the details of an episode in the mid twentieth-century history of American tort law, from which I intend to draw some observations on the place of history in tort law, or, put more precisely, the relationship between tort law and its surrounding cultural contexts, which amount to, when one has some distance from those contexts, its history. But before getting to that episode, I want to state, in general terms, what I take the relationship of tort law to its history to be. I don’t think tort law is any different from any other field of law, private or public, in its relationship to history. I’ve completed two books in a series called Law in American History, and am in the process of writing a third. The coverage of those works ranges from the colonial years through the twentieth century, and I take up fields in both public and private law, including torts. Throughout the books my theory of the relationship of law to its “history”–its surrounding contexts–is that the relationship is reciprocal. Law, at any point in time, is both affected by developments in the larger culture and affects them.