Book Section: Essays and Review: The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender, and Tort Law

Abstract

The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender, and Tort Law by Martha Chamallas and Jennifer Wriggins, challenges the traditional view of tort law as neutral and objective, and aims to demonstrate instead that tort law is littered with, if not substantially shaped by, gender and racial bias. When the first page asserts that “from the types of injuries recognized, to judgments about causation, to the valuation of injuries,” tort law “has been affected by the social identity of the parties and cultural views on gender and race,” traditionalists and moderates cannot help but read the rest of the book with more than an insubstantial level of skepticism. The basic notion that tort law is less accepting of claims by women and minorities simply would not strike many readers as immediately plausible because negligence and intentional tort claims, on their face, know no race or gender. Most students of tort law can search their knowledge of the subject and not call to mind any more than maybe a few examples that fit Chamallas and Wriggins’ claim. While not perfect, tort law’s open ended concepts of negligence, intent, fault, and harm would seem immediately available to all on equal terms. Thus, against this backdrop, the book’s aim is no small task, nor its success a foregone conclusion, which is what makes the book so insightful and compelling in the end.