Any title containing dates immediately raises questions: why start there?, why stop then? When the answer is not immediately obvious - the start and end of a monarch's reign, say, or a war - there may be little consolation in the reader's discovering that the contents of such books almost always break their titles' implicit promises to confine themselves to events between certain dates. So it might be as well to come clean right at the very start, and admit that nothing special or symbolic happened in either 1900 or 1950 that will serve as the beginning and end points of this book. Indeed, in a discipline like law where so much turns on interpreting what has happened in the past, a pedantically strict attitude to start dates is always likely to create more problems than it solves. As readers may have guessed from the suspiciously round numbers in the title, this is a book about the history of tort law that focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, but has no hesitation in straying slightly outside the period where the subject-matter calls for it

The first historical treatment of tort law in England during a formative period of its development.

Any title containing dates immediately raises questions: why start there?, why stop then? When the answer is not immediately obvious - the start and end of a monarch's reign, say, or a war - there may be little consolation in the reader's discovering that the contents of such books almost always break their titles' implicit promises to confine themselves to events between certain dates. So it might be as well to come clean right at the very start, and admit that nothing special or symbolic happened in either 1900 or 1950 that will serve as the beginning and end points of this book. Indeed, in a discipline like law where so much turns on interpreting what has happened in the past, a pedantically strict attitude to start dates is always likely to create more problems than it solves. As readers may have guessed from the suspiciously round numbers in the title, this is a book about the history of tort law that focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, but has no hesitation in straying slightly outside the period where the subject-matter calls for it.

G. Edward White's 'Tort Law in America' is regarded as a standard in the field. Concise, accessible and wide-ranging, White's work represents a major work of legal scholarship, providing an enduring intellectual history of American tort law.

This work is a collection of essays on the growth of tort law concepts of negligence, fault, and liability in response to the industrialization of the nineteenth century. The articles assess the distributive economic consequences of tort law and its effectiveness in protecting average citizens.

This history of tort law in America looks at how the subject has been conceptualized, pointing out why changes in rules occurred, and who did the changing. White approaches his subject from four perspectives: intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, the phenomenon of professionalization in the late 19th and 20th centuries in America, and the recurrent concerns of tort law since it became a discrete field.

The publication of Scholars of Tort Law marks the beginning of a long overdue rebalancing of private law scholarship. Instead of concentrating on judicial decisions and academic commentary only for what that commentary says about judicial decisions, the book explores the contributions of scholars of tort law in their own right. The work of a selection of leading scholars of tort law from across the common law world, ranging from Thomas Cooley (1824–1898) to Patrick Atiyah (1931–2018), is addressed by eminent current scholars in the field. The focus of the contributions is on the nature of the work produced by each of the scholars in question, important influences on their work, and the influence which that work in turn had on thinking about tort law. The process of subjecting tort law scholarship to sustained analysis provides new insights into the intellectual development of tort law and reveals the important role played by scholars in that development. By focusing on the work of influential tort scholars, the book serves to emphasise the importance of legal scholarship to the development of the common law more generally.