John C.P. Goldberg, Torts, in The Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law (Andrew S. Gold, John C. P. Goldberg, Daniel B. Kelly, Emily Sherwin & Henry E. Smith eds., 2020).
Abstract: In the United States and elsewhere, the Law and Economics movement has fundamentally reshaped how judges, lawyers, and law students understand tort law. And yet economic interpretations of tort law – as opposed to prescriptive analyses of tort problems that deploy economic methodologies – face insuperable difficulties. Why, then, do the endure? The answer is that some of the leading economic accounts actually manage to identify, albeit in a distorted way, many of tort law’s core features. In keeping with the emphasis of the New Private Law on analysis that is down-to-earth without being reductionist, this Chapter explains why these same features can be captured without distortion though an understanding of tort as a law of wrongs and redress.