Torts

It was a survey period marked by the lack of reconciliation. As always, the victims of civil wrongs other than breaches of contract, unreconciled to the perpetrators of those wrongs, sought redress instead 'in the courts, especially, for present purposes, the appellate courts. Plaintiffs remained unreconciled to the limitations on their rights in malpractice cases and prosecuted more appeals than ever in this burgeoning legal field. Defendants of many stripes, and some plaintiffs, too, unreconciled to the litigational tactics of their adversaries, continued to flood the courts with allegations of abusive litigation.

The courts themselves, apparently unreconciled to some of their own precedents, created several startling legal anomalies. Taking their text from all this, these writers are, if not reconciled, at least resigned to presenting what is necessarily only a representative sample of the hundreds of torts decisions encompassed in the survey period. Yet, the reader may be at once reconciled and consoled with this fact about the tort law: Its variety and vigor vitiate its vagueness and vertiginousness.