Two preeminent legal scholars explain what tort law is all about and why it matters, and describe their own view of tort’s philosophical basis: civil recourse theory. Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly. Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.

JumpStart is a new study aid series covering the first-year course areas. Each title is a short book, roughly 170 pages, that addresses a problem students experience as they navigate their first year courses. Often first year students are expected to learn substantive law by reading judicial opinions without a framework or process to help them comprehend what they are reading. The JumpStart series supplies the context and prepares students to apply the rules in a litigation context. Titles in the series can be used as a general introduction to law school or as an introduction to torts. The books are most useful early in the first semester as well as in orientation courses or as summer reading for students entering their first year of law school. The series will appeal to academic success/support coordinators as well as the course-area professors. Ross Sandler is the series editor. His JumpStart: Torts is the first title in the series. JumpStart: Torts offers a detailed step-by-step approach to the stages of litigation, beginning with stating a theory of the case, moving through determining facts and making motions to receiving the holding of the case. Legal reasoning and the litigation process are taught via numerous judicial opinions with full analysis of each. Judicial opinions and analyses are made comprehensible without in-class explanation in a straightforward, clear, and informal writing style. Class-tested for success, JumpStart: Torts features pedagogical elements that support learning and facilitate use. As with each book in the series, the opening chapter provides a glossary of the terms, idioms, and procedures encountered in reading cases in tort law. Many judicial opinions are accompanied by an artist-drawn "cartoon" that illustrates the conflict or issue of the case. Short, easy-to-read opinions focus on ordinary situations with simple fact patterns that apply settled rules of law and principles. The book ends with a Practice Exam: a clear explanation of how to approach the typical torts essay exam question as well as insight into how professors grade exams. The chapter ends with a practice essay question. Two sample answers are included: a strong answer and a weaker answer. Each answer includes notes that point out where students did well and where they could improve their answers. Features: Detailed step-by-step approach to the stages of litigation begins by stating a theory of the case moves through determining fact and making motions to receiving the holding of the case Illustrates legal reasoning and the litigation process teaches through numerous judicial opinions with analysis Judicial opinions and analyses comprehensible without in-class explanation Straightforward, clear, informal style Class-tested material Pedagogical features Opening chapter glossary of the terms, idioms, and procedures encountered in reading cases

Who controls how one’s identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity—a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities—to answer that question, not just for the famous but for everyone. In challenging the conventional story of the right of publicity’s emergence, development, and justifications, Rothman shows how it transformed people into intellectual property, leading to a bizarre world in which you can lose ownership of your own identity. This shift and the right’s subsequent expansion undermine individual liberty and privacy, restrict free speech, and suppress artistic works. The Right of Publicity traces the right’s origins back to the emergence of the right of privacy in the late 1800s. The central impetus for the adoption of privacy laws was to protect people from “wrongful publicity.” This privacy-based protection was not limited to anonymous private citizens but applied to famous actors, athletes, and politicians. Beginning in the 1950s, the right transformed into a fully transferable intellectual property right, generating a host of legal disputes, from control of dead celebrities like Prince, to the use of student athletes’ images by the NCAA, to lawsuits by users of Facebook and victims of revenge porn. The right of publicity has lost its way. Rothman proposes returning the right to its origins and in the process reclaiming privacy for a public world.