As a law student at Harvard in the 1950s, I heard a professor joke that at the school they contract the law of torts in the morning and distort the law of contracts in the afternoon. We students were supposed to chuckle accordingly. We had been taught that tort law and contract law were the twin pillars of our country’s privately invoked legal system, but my fellow law students and I could not then have foreseen how weakened these twin pillars would become.
Illustrations by John Ritter
The story of how tort law originally evolved from…
