Chapter 8. Remedies, Part 1: As If It Had Never Happened -- Chapter 9. Remedies, Part 2: Before a Court -- Chapter 10. Conclusion: Horizontal and Vertical -- Index

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A waiter spills hot coffee on a customer. A person walks on another person’s land. A moored boat damages a dock during a storm. A frustrated neighbor bangs on the wall. A reputation is ruined by a mistaken news report. Although the details vary, the law recognizes all of these as torts, different ways in which one person wrongs another. Tort law can seem puzzling: sometimes people are made to pay damages when they are barely or not at fault, while at other times serious losses go uncompensated. In this pioneering book, Arthur Ripstein brings coherence and unity to the baffling diversity of tort law in an original theory that is philosophically grounded and analytically powerful. Ripstein shows that all torts violate the basic moral idea that each individual is in charge of his or her own person and property, and never in charge of another individual’s person or property. Battery and trespass involve one person wrongly using another’s body or things, while negligence injures others by imposing risks to them in ways that are inconsistent with their independence. Tort remedies aim to provide a substitute for the right that was violated. As Private Wrongs makes clear, tort law not only protects our bodies and property but constitutes our entitlement to use them as we see fit, consistent with the entitlement of others to do the same.

The first English-language treatise on the subject of torts. Orginally published: Little Brown, and Co., 1859. Two vols., xxxviii, 540; xxxvii, 719 pp. As the Dictionary of American Biography points out, this treatise marked the "beginning of a revolution in legal thought" because it was the first to approach torts as a distinct legal category. Before Hilliard, "practical text-writers...regarded such wrongs as too divergent in nature for unified treatment and merely discussed some distinct wrong" (V:53-54). FRANCIS HILLIARD [1806-1878], a Harvard educated attorney who lived in Boston, was a prolific and distinguished author of treatises on jurisprudence, real property, contracts, business law and other subjects.