Recklessness claim in fatal Ford rollover accident allows plaintiff to push past Ga. statute of repose

"Crash Overview Diagram" by defense expert Donald F. Tandy, Jr.
(no. 103 filed Mar. 15, 2022) in Cosper v. Ford Motor Co.
(N.D. Ga. filed Oct. 11, 2018).

The Georgia Supreme Court defined "recklessness" in an erudite November opinion that allowed a plaintiff to surmount the statute of repose with a product liability claim.

In federal court in Georgia, the underlying case involves a fatal Ford Explorer rollover accident on Christmas Day in 2015. The plaintiff sued Ford Motor Co. in product liability over the integrity of the vehicle roof. Arising more than 10 years after the vehicle's manufacture, the claim seems to run afoul of the Georgia statute of repose.

But the statute of repose has an exception for "conduct which manifests a willful, reckless, or wanton disregard for life or property." The plaintiff aimed to surmount the statute of repose by accusing Ford of recklessness. The federal court certified the case to the Georgia Supreme Court to explain what recklessness means in the statute.

Recklessness is a useful but sometimes elusive concept in tort law. Insofar as culpability can be described on a spectrum running from intentional tort to negligence to no fault, recklessness is usually located at the midway point between intent, a subjective state of mind, and negligence, an objectively tested condition. One formulation of recklessness employs the canny "reason to know" analysis, which mixes subjective and objective testing of a defendant's state of mind by allowing reasonable inference (objective) from actually known facts (subjective).

But recklessness is a quirky creature of perspective. Recklessness looks different if you approach the concept from its intent side, when it describes a state of mind short of but indicative of pure subjective intent, or from its negligence side, when recklessness describes a kind of highly exaggerated carelessness.

This Janus-faced character causes recklessness to manifest in different legal tests amid different fact patterns. At a more theoretical level, the dichotomy reveals a deeper truth about culpability, which is that the useful metaphor of a spectrum disguises arguably qualitative differences between intentional wrongs and accidents.

The upshot is that recklessness can mean many things to many people. And the fact that the Georgia Supreme Court had never defined the term in the statute of repose was problematic for the federal court in the Ford Motor Co. case.

The Georgia statute pairs recklessness with the famous doublet, "willful" and "wanton." These terms are even more problematic. While they are well known to historical common law, they have not been uniformly incorporated into modern conceptions of culpability. Their ambiguity thus has been an occasional source of controversy in modern times, for example, in international disagreement over construction of the Warsaw Convention that governed air carrier liability in the 20th century.

The plaintiff in Ford Motor Co. did not allege "willful" misconduct, which smacks of intent and feels incompatible with a product liability claim. That's OK, the Georgia Supreme Court decided, because the disjunctive ("or") in the statute should be taken at face value. So recklessness can suffice by itself.

In a review worth reading for legal linguaphiles, to define recklessness, the court reviewed a range of precedents and sources, including the Restatement of Torts. (The court cited the "Restatement (First) of Torts § 500"; section 500 appears in the Second Restatement.) In the end, the court settled on a definition that hewed to the Restatement:

[when] the actor intentionally does an act or fails to do an act which it is his duty to the other to do, knowing or having reason to know of facts which would lead a reasonable person to realize that the actor's conduct not only creates an unreasonable risk of harm to another's life or property but also involves a high degree of probability that substantial harm will result to the other's life or property.

The approach comprises definitional components that are common in recklessness formulations, even if the words and particulars sometimes vary: volitional action (not necessarily intent as to result), knowledge of predicate facts (from which one might deduce risk), unreasonable risk (not necessarily unreasonable conduct), elevated probability of harm, and elevated magnitude of harm. (Cf. my YouTube Study of Intent (2017).)

Significantly, this approach to recklessness is free of moral appraisal. Thus, modern recklessness often is synonymized with "actual malice" and distinguished from "common law malice." The older latter imports the notion of "evil," or at least "hatred." My torts textbook examines this distinction when it is salient in punitive damages, for which some states employ one standard, some employ the other, and some employ them both in the alternative.

In the Georgia case, if recklessness can be proved, the plaintiff will be able to work around the statute of repose. The proof won't come easily. But usually it is easier for a plaintiff to show that a corporate defendant was reckless than to show that it acted "willfully" or "evilly," descriptors more often associated with persons.

Justice Verda M. Colvin

The case is Ford Motor Co. v. Cosper (Ga. Sept. 19, 2023). Justice Verda M. Colvin wrote the opinion of the court.

In 2021, Justice Colvin became the first African-American woman appointed to Georgia's high court by a Republican governor. An Atlanta native, she studied government and religion at Sweet Briar College, graduating in 1987 (just a couple of years before I arrived at my alma mater in nearby Lexington, Va.), and law at the University of Georgia, graduating in 1990. In May 2023, Justice Colvin gave the commencement address at Sweet Briar. 

Justice Colvin told New Town Macon that "Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired her since she was a child through their devotion to service." In 2016, Judge Colvin spoke to youth in the "Consider Consequences" program of the Bibb County, Ga., Sheriff's Office; a recording (below) of the powerful allocution went viral.

No recklessness, no liability, court affirms in case of head injury during softball batting practice

mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Applying recklessness doctrine in a non-competitive context, the Massachusetts Appeals Court yesterday affirmed non-liability for a collegiate softballer and Suffolk University in the case of a player hit in the head by a bat during practice.

Tort and Sport

Personal injury in sport offers fertile ground for exploring tort law, because athletic competition represents a suspension of the social contract.  Ordinarily, everyone in an orderly society knows not to push, tackle, or punch other people.  But in a sport, that can be exactly what you're supposed to do.  So a special, carefully designed standard of conduct, "the rules of the game," supersedes the usual web of unwritten norms, conveniently yielding a laboratory for socio-legal study.

If one fails to recognize the aberrant nature of the sport context, anomalous legal results pertain.  For example, every injury resulting from a collision of players on the football field is accidental, so a potential source of negligence liability.  Alternatively, many such injuries are batteries, because the defendant bore subjective intent to cause offensive contact.  At the same time, the defenses of assumption of risk and consent raise frame-of-reference problems in application.  An athlete generally assumes a risk of injury, a defendant argues, but not necessarily injury specifically in the way that it happened, the plaintiff counters.  The usual tort doctrines just don't work well to solve conflict over sporting injury.

To overcome this problem, courts in many states, including Massachusetts, have employed the tort standard of recklessness in sport cases.  Recklessness focuses on a defendant's indifference to a risk of high probability or magnitude (tests vary).  For its culpability analysis, recklessness hybridizes subjective and objective tests for culpability, thereby balancing the prohibitive prerequisite of defendant's intent with slim proof of carelessness.  The test is not a perfect tool for sporting-injury cases, but it works much better than intent and negligence rules to help courts patrol the outer boundaries of social-normative conduct in an exceptional situation.

j4p4n from openclipart.org

In Borella v. Renfro, in December 2019, the Massachusetts Appeals Court applied the recklessness standard to a case of ice-hockey injury, relying on precedent of the Supreme Judicial Court dating to 1989.  The court explained in Borella:

In a game where the players wear sharpened steel blades on their feet and are garbed in protective gear from head to toe, the playing field is a glossy ice rink, checking not only is allowed but a fundamental aspect of the way the game is played, and the object of the game is to put a puck into a goal (or to prevent the same), the plaintiff, seventeen year old Daniel J. Borella, was cut on the wrist by one of the blades worn by the defendant, Julion Scott Lever, in what Borella acknowledges was a "freak accident" occurring moments after Lever checked Borella hard from behind into the boards and took the puck away.

.... In this case, we apply [the recklessness] standard to the game of ice hockey[,] in which physical contact between players standing on two thin metal blades atop a sheet of ice is not simply an unavoidable by-product of vigorous play, but is a fundamental part of the way the game is played. We hold that where, as here, the record is devoid of evidence from which a jury rationally could conclude that the player's conduct is extreme misconduct outside the range of the ordinary activity inherent in the sport, there is no legal liability under the recklessness standard. For that reason, we affirm summary judgment in favor of Lever.

Dissenting, Justice Peter J. Rubin would have sent arguable questions of fact to the jury.  But he did not disagree, for jury instruction, that recklessness was the correct standard.

Batting Practice

Despite the efficacy of the recklessness standard in sport cases, things get tricky at the margins, especially when injury occurs off field, or outside the narrow context of competitive conflict between players in the course of the game.  The instant case presented such a challenge, as one player was hit in the head by a teammate accidentally, while the teammate was engaged in batting practice.

Should the recklessness analysis pertain to "friendly fire" in practice, too?  Yes, the Appeals Court answered, consistently with precedent in other states.  Recklessness is the appropriate standard for athletic practice.  

In the instant case, the unfortunate accident occurred between friends on the Suffolk University softball team.  The plaintiff-player walked too close to the swinging defendant-player at just the wrong time.  Their testimonies, and that of the supervising coach, might have supported findings for or against fault-based liability in negligence, but no matter.  The defendant's conduct did not rise to the recklessness standard, and the trial court correctly awarded summary judgment to the defense.

The court framed its choice of the recklessness standard as a problem in duty.  Duty in tort law is determined "by reference to existing social values and customs and appropriate social policy," the court quoted precedent.  This point is significant for reasons related to the deeper mechanics of tort law.  Without diving into the problem here, it will suffice to say that the interrelationship of duty and fault standards sometimes matters, especially when a change in the relevant law occurs, whether through common law evolution or legislative enactment.

Co-defendant Suffolk University also won summary judgment.  The players had signed waivers of university liability in negligence, and the evidence failed to support gross negligence or recklessness in the coach's and university's supervision of the softball practice.

Superior Court Decision

In affirming, the Appeals Court opinion described the Superior Court's application of recklessness doctrine as "thoughtful."  That appraisal prompted me to seek a copy of the trial court opinion.

Regrettably, Massachusetts is a jurisdiction that thrives on secrecy in trial court records.  The Superior Court for Suffolk County, which includes the metropolis of Boston, puts dockets online, and the interface looks like the same software used by my home bar jurisdiction of Washington, D.C.  But links to document images, which D.C. has offered for a few years, are not available from the Massachusetts system.  Given the state of technology in the courts and in the country, I can attribute this omission only to willful obscurity.

Graciously, attorney Robert B. Smith (LinkedIn, Twitter), Demoura|Smith LLP, who represented Suffolk University softball head coach Jaclyn Davis, shared with me a copy of the memorandum decision in the Superior Court.  The court wrote:

[Defendant-player] Ball argues that because Brandt's injury occurred while she and Brandt were participating in an athletic event, she may only be liable for conduct that was willful, wanton, or reckless. Ball contends that she is entitled to summary judgment because Brandt has no reasonable expectation of proving her conduct was willful, wanton, or reckless. The court agrees.

"Players, when they engage in sport, agree to undergo some physical contacts which could amount to assault and battery absent the players' consent." Gauvin v. Clark, 404 Mass. 450, 454 (1989). "The courts are wary of imposing wide tort liability on sports participants, lest the law chill the vigor of athletic competition." Id. Therefore, "a participant in an athletic event can be liable to another participant only when his or her actions amount to a willful, wanton, or reckless disregard for the safety of the other participant." Gray v. Giroux, 49 Mass. App. Ct. 436, 438 (2000) [affirming summary judgment for defendant in golf-club-to-head case].

Brandt argues that the present case is distinguishable from those requiring a showing of willful, wanton, or reckless conduct because her injury was not caused by an opponent during a competition. However, the court declines to construe the broad language of the controlling cases in a manner that excludes Brandt's claim from their purview. Members of the same athletic team participating in a team practice are no less "participant[s] in an athletic event" than members of opposing teams during a game. [Cf.] Dugan v. Thayer Academy, [32 Mass. L. Rep. 657] (Mass. Super. Ct. 2015) (willful, wanton, or reckless standard did not apply where alleged negligence occurred before and after, but not during, athletic event [field hockey]). Accordingly, the willful, wanton, or reckless standard of care applies to Brandt's claim against Ball.

The appellate case is Brandt v. Davis, No. 19-P-1189 (Mass. App. Ct. Nov. 2, 2020).  Justice Joseph M. Ditkoff wrote the opinion for a unanimous panel that also comprised Justices Wolohojian and Maldonado.  The case below was Brandt v. Davis, No. 2017-00641-B (Mass. Super. Ct. Suffolk County Apr. 16, 2019).  Presiding in the Superior Court was Justice Mark C. Gildea, an alumnus of Suffolk Law.

Mass. high court allows generic-drug consumer to sue Big Pharma for reckless labeling

Just more than a week ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) issued an adroit and important decision on drug manufacturer liability.  In a decision worthy of other states’ attention, the SJC allowed a common law recklessness claim for failure to warn, unobstructed by federal preemption.  The case is Rafferty v. Merck & Co., No. SJC-12347 (Mar. 16, 2018) (PDF), per Chief Justice Ralph Gants.

It was in the last season of Boston Legal in 2008 (s5e02) that Alan Shore (James Spader), maybe my favorite TV lawyer, took on Big Pharma, right on the heels of victory over Big Tobacco.  In real life, Big Pharma has long been about the business of avoiding tort liability.  When labeling defects have been alleged, the Big Pharma defense has found traction in federal preemption, owing to the FDA’s close supervision of labeling under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C. §§ 301, et seq.

One thread of this debate involves the relative responsibilities of brand-name and generic manufacturers.  In 2011, in PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, 564 U.S. 604, the U.S. Supreme Court, 5-4, rejected liability for a generic drug maker accused of failure to warn of side effects when the label matched that of the brand-name equivalent.

In the SJC last week, the plaintiff also was injured taking a generic drug, but sought to hold the brand-name maker accountable in negligence and consumer protection, accusing the maker of failure to warn on the label that the generic provider copied.  The plaintiff took the generic drug finasteride, in lieu of defendant Merck’s brand-name drug Proscar, to treat an enlarged prostate.  The label warned of sexual dysfunction as a temporary side effect, but the plaintiff experienced persistent dysfunction.  The plaintiff alleged that Merck was aware of the risk from several studies and had changed the warning label accordingly in some foreign markets, including Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Significantly, then, the plaintiff admittedly complained against a defendant whose drug he did not take.  But the plaintiff traced causation to Merck, because FDA regulation of generic drugs compelled the generic maker to copy the Merck label, and PLIVA precluded liability for the generic maker.  The trial court dismissed, holding that brand-name-maker liability to a patient who did not take the maker’s drug also would “disturb the balance struck” by statute and regulation for the approval of generic drugs.

The SJC regarded the problem as one of duty.  Typically, the court explained, a manufacturer owes a duty of care only to consumers of the manufacturer’s own products.  The First Circuit upheld that logic in a 1983 case under Massachusetts law, Carrier v. Riddell, Inc., 721 F.2d 867.  The court, per then-Circuit Judge Stephen Breyer, denied recovery to a high school football player who blamed a helmet defect for his severe spinal injury.  He had not used the defendant-manufacturer’s helmet, but teammates had.  He alleged that had the defendant properly labeled its helmets, he would have been informed properly about his own.  The SJC further analogized the problem to the effort to hold responsible for a shooting an earlier-in-time actor accused of failing to secure the firearm.  The key to this duty analysis, the court explained, is the foreseeability of a plaintiff-victim—reminiscent of Judge Cardozo’s classic “orbit of duty” analysis in Palsgraf.

Duty in the drug liability problem, the SJC reasoned, is not the same as the product liability analysis in Carrier.  Rather, consistently with the federal regulatory scheme, Merck knows that generic manufacturers will be compelled to rely on its labeling.  Merck therefore has control over the generic label, and duty follows control.  One might say that the consumers of the generic drug are therefore foreseeable victims, for duty purposes, or that the chain of proximate causation runs intact through the intermediary generic maker, because the intermediary lacks control over the label.  Like Palsgraf itself, the case demonstrates the fluid interchangeability of duty and causation.

However, the court further reasoned, negligence, like strict liability, might be too low a liability threshold.  Shifting the liability of generic consumers on to brand-name makers adds to the cost of drug research and development in a way that might interfere with the legislative-regulatory scheme.  Under PLIVA, the brand-name maker could not share joint liability with the generic maker.  At the same time, allowing the brand-name maker wholly to escape liability would allow an injured plaintiff no recovery under any circumstances.  A balance may be struck, the court concluded, when the plaintiff can prove recklessness, or more, intent, on the part of the brand-name maker.

The court wrote: “We have nevertheless consistently recognized that there is a certain core duty—a certain irreducible minimum duty of care, owed to all persons—that as a matter of public policy cannot be abrogated: that is, the duty not to intentionally or recklessly cause harm to others.”  The court analogized to the duty of care owed by defendants in other exceptional areas of Massachusetts tort law: landowner to trespasser, defamation defendant to public figure, bailee to bailor, and athletes and coaches to competitors.

Otherwise put, the court maintained the essential balance of tort law upon its four fundamental elements, duty, breach, proximate cause, and injury.  The extension of liability to a defendant-manufacturer who did not actually make the injurious product depressed the thresholds for duty and causation.  To maintain balance, the requisite standard of breach is amplified to recklessness or intent.  Physical injury remains constant. 

Chief Justice Gants’s opinion in Rafferty is insightful and masterful.  It takes account of the greater endeavor of tort law to define civil wrongs, while balancing the corrective role of the judiciary with the policy-making role of the legislative and executive branches, and also striking a balance in federalism between tort accountability in the states and market regulation under the Commerce Clause.  At the same time, the decision recognizes how these balances are struck across the body of tort law in areas that usually seem only distantly related, from premises liability to reputational harm to sports.  This would be one for the casebooks, if casebooks were still a thing.

Free torts textbook ready for academic year 2024-25

TORTZ: A Study of American Tort Law is complete and revised for the coming academic year 2024-25.

The two-volume textbook is posted for free download from SSRN (vol. 1, vol. 2), and available in hardcopy from Lulu.com at cost, about $30 per volume plus shipping.

• SSRN volume 1
• SSRN volume 2
• Lulu.com hardcopies

This final iteration of the book now, for the first time, includes its final three chapters: (16) interference and business torts, (17) government liability and civil rights, and (18) tort alternatives.

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TORTZ TABLE OF CONTENTS

Volume 1

Chapter 1: Introduction

A. Welcome
B. The Fundamental Problem
C. Parameters
D. Etymology and Vocabulary
E. “The Pound Progression”
F. Alternatives
G. Review

Chapter 2: Intentional Torts

A. Introduction
B. Assault

1. History
2. The Restatement of Torts
3. Subjective and Objective Testing
4. Modern Rule
5. Transferred Intent
6. Statutory Torts and Harassment

C. Battery

1. Modern Rule
2. The Eggshell Plaintiff
3. Knowledge of a Substantially Certain Result
4. Common Law Evolution and Battered Woman Syndrome

D. False Imprisonment

1. Modern Rule
2. Problems

E. Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (IIED)

1. Dynamic Intent
2. Modern Rule
3. The “Heart Balm” Torts

F. Fraud

1. Fraud in Context
2. Modern Rule
3. Pleading Fraud
4. Exercise

G. The “Process” Torts

1. Innate Imprecision
2. Modern Rule
3. Majority Rejection of Malicious Civil Prosecution

H. “Prima Facie Tort”

1. Origin of Intentional Tort
2. Modern Rule

Chapter 3: Defenses to Intentional Torts 

A. Introduction
B. Defenses of Self, Other, and Property
C. The Spring Gun Case
D. Arrest Privilege and Merchant’s Privilege
E. Consent

1. Modern Rule
2. Scope of Consent
3. Medical Malpractice
4. Limits of Consent

F. Consent in Sport, or Recklessness

1. The Problem of Sport
2. Recklessness

Chapter 4: Negligence

A. Introduction
B. Modern Rule
C. Paradigmatic Cases
D. Historical and Theoretical Approaches to Negligence

1. Origin
2. Foreseeability
3. Custom
4. Augmented Standards
5. Economics

a. Introduction
b. “The Hand Formula”
c. Coase Theorem, Normativity, and Transaction Costs

6. Aristotelian Justice
7. Insurance and Loss-Spreading

E. Landowner Negligence, or Premises Liability

1. Theory of Duty and Standards of Breach
2. Common Law Tripartite Approach
3. Variations from the Unitary Approach in the Third Restatement
4. Applying the Framework, and Who Decides

F. Responsibility for Third-Party Conduct

1. Attenuated Causation, or “the Frances T.  Problem”: Negligence Liability in Creating Opportunity for a Criminal or Tortious Actor
2. Vicarious Liability and Attenuated Causation in the Employment Context: Respondeat Superior and “Direct” Negligence Theories

G. Statutory Torts and Negligence Per Se

1. Statutory Torts
2. Negligence Per Se

a. Introduction
b. Threshold Test
c. Three Mile Island

H. Medical Negligence
I. Spoliation of Evidence

1. Introduction
2. Minority Rule
3. Recognition or Non-Recognition of the Tort Approach
4. Majority Approach

J. Beyond Negligence

Chapter 5: Defenses to Negligence

A. Express Assumption of Risk (EAOR)
B. EAOR in Medical Negligence, and the Informed Consent Tort

1. Development of the Doctrine
2. The “Reasonable Patient” Standard
3. Modern Rule of Informed Consent
4. Causation in Informed Consent
5. Experimental Medicine

C. “Implied Assumption of Risk” (IAOR)

1. Everyday Life
2. Twentieth-Century Rule
3. Play and Sport
4. Work

D. Contributory Negligence

1. Twentieth-Century Rule
2. Complete Defense
3. Vitiation by “Last Clear Chance”

E. Comparative Fault
F. IAOR in the Age of Comparative Fault

1. The Demise of “IAOR”
2. Whither “Secondary Reasonable IAOR”?
3. Revisiting Mrs. Pursley at Gulfway General Hospital

G. Statutes of Limitations
H. Imputation of Negligence

Chapter 6: Subjective Standards

A. Introduction
B. Gender

1. The Reasonable Family
2. When Gender Matters

C. Youth

1. When Youth Matters
2. Attractive Nuisance
3. When Youth Doesn’t Matter

D. Mental Limitations

1. General Approach
2. Disputed Policy

Chapter 7: Strict Liability

A. Categorical Approach
B. Non-Natural Use of Land
C. Abnormally Dangerous Activities

1. Defining the Class
2. Modern Industry

D. Product Liability

1. Adoption of Strict Liability
2. Modern Norms
3. “Big Tobacco”
4. Frontiers of Product Liability

Chapter 8: Necessity

A. The Malleable Concept of Necessity
B. Necessity in Tort Law
C. Making Sense of Vincent
D. Necessity, the Liability Theory

Chapter 9: Damages

A. Introduction
B. Vocabulary of Damages
C. Theory of Damages
D. Calculation of Damages
E. Valuation of Intangibles
F. Remittitur
G. Wrongful Death and Survival Claims

1. Historical Common Law
2. Modern Statutory Framework

a. Lord Campbell’s Act and Wrongful Death
b. Survival of Action After Death of a Party

3. Problems of Application

H. “Wrongful Birth” and “Wrongful Life”
I. Punitive Damages

1. Introduction
2. Modern Rule
3. Pinpointing the Standard

J. Rethinking Death Compensation

Volume 2

Chapter 10: Res Ipsa Loquitur

A. Basic Rules of Proof
B. Res Ipsa Loquitur (RIL)

1. Modern Rule
2. Paradigmatic Fact Patterns

Chapter 11: Multiple Liabilities

A. Introduction
B. Alternative Liability
C. Joint and Ancillary Liability
D. Market-Share Liability Theory
E. Indemnification, Contribution, and Apportionment

1. Active-Passive Indemnity
2. Contribution and Apportionment
3. Apportionment and the Effect of Settlement

F. Rules and Evolving Models in Liability and Enforcement
G. Review and Application of Models

Chapter 12: Attenuated Duty and Causation

A. Introduction
B. Negligence Per Se Redux

1. The Problem in Duty
2. The Problem in Causation
3. The Problem in Public Policy

C. Duty Relationships and Causation Timelines

1. Introduction
2. Frances T. Redux, or Intervening Criminal Acts
3. Mental Illness and Tarasoff Liability
4. Dram Shop and Social Host Liability
5. Rescue Doctrine and “the Fire Fighter Rule”

a. Inverse Rules of Duty
b. Application and Limits

6. Palsgraf: The Orbit and the Stream

a. The Classic Case
b. A Deeper Dig

D. Principles of Duty and Causation

1. Duty
2. Causation

a. The Story of Causation
b. Proximate Cause in the Second Restatement
c. Scope of Liability in the Third Restatement
d. Proximate Cause in the Third Restatement, and Holdover Rules
e. A Study of Transition: Doull v. Foster

E. The Outer Bounds of Tort Law

1. Balancing the Fundamental Elements
2. Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress (NIED)

a. Rule of No Liability
b. Bystanders and Borderline NIED

3. Economic Loss Rule

a. The Injury Requirement
b. Outer Limits of Tort Law
c. Loss in Product Liability and the Single Integrated Product Rule

Chapter 13: Affirmative Duty

A. Social Policy
B. The American Rule
C. Comparative Perspectives
D. Bystander Effect, or “Kitty Genovese Syndrome”

Chapter 14: Nuisance and Property Torts

A. Trespass and Conversion
B. Private Nuisance
C. Public Nuisance and the Distinction Between Private and Public
D. “Super Tort”

Chapter 15: Communication and Media Torts

A. Origin of “Media Torts”
B. Defamation

1. Framework and Rules
2. Defamation of Private Figures

a. Defamation Proof
b. Defamation Defense

3. Anti-SLAPP Defense
4. Section 230 Defense
5. Constitutional Defamation

a. Sea Change: New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
b. Extending Sullivan
c. Reconsidering Sullivan

C. Invasion of Privacy

1. Framework and Rules

a. Disclosure
b. Intrusion
c. False Light
d. Right of Publicity
e. Data Protection

2. Constitutional Privacy and False Light
3. Demonstrative Cases

a. Disclosure and Intrusion
b. Right of Publicity
c. Bollea v. Gawker Media

4. Data Protection, Common Law, and Evolving Recognition of Dignitary Harms

Chapter 16: Interference and Business Torts

A. Business Torts in General

1. Tort Taxonomy
2. The Broad Landscape
3. Civil RICO

B. Wrongful Termination
C. Tortious Interference

Chapter 17: Government Liability and Civil Rights

A. Sovereign Immunity

1. Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA)
2. Text and History of the FTCA
3. Discretionary Function Immunity

B. Civil Rights

1. “Constitutional Tort”
2. Core Framework
3. Official Immunities
4. Climate Change

C. Qui Tam
D. Human Rights

1. Alien Tort Statute
2. Anti-Terrorism Laws

Chapter 18: Tort Alternatives

A. Worker Compensation

1. Introduction and History
2. Elements and Causation
3. Efficacy and Reform

B. Ad Hoc Compensation Funds

Shielding business from coronavirus torts neglects deep-seated dysfunction in litigation, health insurance

Amid reopening and the controversy over reopening, American private business is seeking legislative protection against coronavirus-related tort litigation.

To oversimplify, businesses are worried about being sued if a worker or customer contracts the virus in the workplace or in a retail space.  Tuesday morning, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley told National Public Radio that the Chamber is not asking for blanket immunity, but "a safe harbor ... against frivolous lawsuits."

"No one wants to protect bad actors here," Bradley said.  He suggested that liability could be predicated on gross negligence or "willfully forcing workers to work in unsafe conditions," which, legally speaking, is recklessness.

Protecting business from litigation is the Chamber's bread and butter, and that doesn't make it the Big Bad Wolf.  Businesses, especially small businesses, represent real people, owners and workers, who, in the absence of any extended public safety net, need to work to make ends meet.  Facing bankruptcy because of prolonged closure or because of the inevitability of a contagious disease surmounting all precaution is a heck of a catch-22 to put a business in.  From that perspective, the Chamber's position seems a fair ask.

At the same time, the Chamber's advocacy highlights two enormous socio-legal problems in America: transaction costs in tort litigation and employment-based health insurance.  A safe harbor would brush both these problems back under the rug.

It isn't tort litigation per se that business fears; it's the cost of that litigation.  Corporate defense—that's the kind of law I practiced a million years ago—wins in litigation with an enviable record.  The burden of proof rests with the plaintiff, which means that even meritorious causes may fail upon the vagaries of evidence.  What's more, the usually superior resources of the corporate defense bar warp the playing field of an adversarial contest predicated on the fallacy that the truth will out.  But the defense's advantages don't change the fact, for many reasons I won't here explore, that litigation costs a fortune.

As a result of runaway transaction costs, everyone loses.  Plaintiffs and would-be plaintiffs with meritorious complaints wind up not suing, winning nothing, or winning far less than will make them whole.  Plaintiffs without meritorious complaints may nevertheless win in settlement.  Meanwhile the cost of defense in every scenario, from insurance in anticipation of litigation to fees in its management, is visited on American business and passed on to the American consumer.  And the mere risk of those costs results in over-deterrence that burdens the American marketplace, distorting economic behavior.  This dysfunction renders the U.S. personal injury system a laughingstock elsewhere in the world.

So if the deck is so stacked against plaintiffs, why do they sue anyway, courting an invariably unfulfilling outcome and burdening even prevailing defendants?  That leads us to the second problem, our dysfunctional health insurance system.

An injured person might wish not to sue, yet become a plaintiff anyway; if the person is insured in any measure, the insurer will make the choice.  And notwithstanding the intervention of insurance, our healthcare system usually leaves an injured, would-be plaintiff holding a bag of devastating, bankruptcy-inducing invoices.   (I asked, rhetorically, earlier this week, what perversion of American values causes a working person diagnosed with terminal cancer to have to spend his precious last year of life carving out time from family and chemotherapy to do fundraising.)  In the American litigation and health insurance systems, a plaintiff sues against all odds because the plaintiff has no other choice.  And in a perverse feedback loop, plaintiff and plaintiff's insurer are permitted to pin their hopes on the likelihood that the threat of excessive transaction costs will shake loose a settlement upon even the weakest of claims.

The problem of healthcare costs is compounded by America's stubborn insistence on employer-based health insurance.  Focused on the bottom line, employers effectively make advance healthcare decisions for workers, which, naturally, increases incurred costs for the workers who become patients.  With precious little control over their healthcare choices, but afraid of wholly losing coverage, risking food and shelter for themselves and their families in a country that eschews social safety nets for people while bailing out corporations, workers make irrational market choices, such as working for less than a living wage, accepting a salary to obviate overtime, going to work in unsafe conditions, and going in sick.  We got into this mess entirely by accident, as Planet Money reported in 2009, and we seem helpless to get out of it.  Ironically, now, the Chamber seeks to protect business against a litigation problem that results in large part from employers' own choices, however economically rational, to leave workers unprotected from catastrophe and trapped in a job by an unlevel labor market.

In the theoretical American tort system, the way it works when I teach its rules and policies to law students in America and Europe, the businesses represented by the U.S. Chamber should not be worried about tort lawsuits.  The test for negligence-based liability in American tort law is simply unreasonableness.  A business that takes reasonable measures to protect workers and customers against infection would suffer no liability, even given the inevitability that contagion will still happen in the face of reasonable precautions.

The truth of the matter is quite different from the theory, and Bradley's statement to NPR demonstrates the divergence.  On the one hand, Bradley said that business must be protected against "frivolous lawsuits."  The problem with that rationale is that the legal system already provides for potentially hefty penalties and sanctions against any plaintiff or plaintiff's lawyer who would try to prosecute a truly frivolous lawsuit.

On the other hand, Bradley said that businesses should be liable only upon a heightened culpability standard, gross negligence or recklessness.  "No one wants to protect bad actors here," he said.  Someone who is grossly negligent or reckless is not necessarily bad; bad is a normative judgment and not a workable legal standard.  Colloquially, he is equating bad with culpability, and that's fair.  But if the equation holds, why is a negligent business not also bad?  Is every negligence lawsuit necessarily a frivolous lawsuit?

Bradley made a strategic semantic choice.  Mention of the "frivolous" is calculated to evoke a gut reaction of displeasure in Americans who have been conditioned by the heavy media messaging of tort reform advocacy.

But let's for the moment cut Bradley and the Chamber some slack.  From where they sit, frivolous cases and negligence claims are equally problematic.  That's because plaintiffs are compelled by the circumstances of our dysfunctional systems to sue in negligence even when the merits might not bear out the claim.  In other words, the brokenness of our litigation and healthcare systems over-incentivizes injured persons to litigate.  A plaintiff decides to sue because of desperate need for compensation, not because of the strength of the claim that the defendant is blameworthy.

Negligence isn't the thing that's broken.  For my money, negligence, meaning the reasonableness test, applied by a Seventh Amendment jury, remains one of the greatest innovations in law in the last two centuries and has proved a worthy American example for the world.

Our litigation system is broken.  And our health insurance system is broken.  Adoption of a safe harbor for defendants within those systems as they exist now will just mean that when a business is negligent, and a person gets sick as a result, the sick person will bear the cost of the illness and of the business's negligence.  That's not how American civil justice is supposed to work.  That's not how it was ever supposed to work.

So many pundits, so many of us, Americans and people around the world, have wondered aloud whether this crisis might at last precipitate real and meaningful change, change that might bring people's standard of living into correlation with our fantastic global wealth and technology.  We've wondered whether, and we've dared hope that, we stand at the threshold of the Great Realization, from which humankind will never turn back.

In that frame of reference, the safe harbor proposed by the Chamber, or moreover statutory immunity from tort liability, would be a profoundly disappointing portent of business as usual.

My thanks to Professor Rebecca Crootof at Richmond Law for an email that got me thinking about this.  Thanks also to any loyal reader who made it this far without pictures.  My "Report from a Social Distance Week 7" is delayed but not forgotten; look for it this weekend.