For the last forty years, no body of law within the civil justice system has experienced greater ferment than has the law of torts. This dynamism withal, the most prominent identified objectives of tort law continue to be the creation of an optimally uniform body of law that gives notice to all that certain behaviors that cause injury or loss to others will trigger obligations, usually including (1) the cessation of the conduct; and (2) compensation of the injured party for harm caused in a measure that will place him, to the extent money damages can do so, in the status quo ante. More recently, these corrective justice motivations have been reevaluated and enlarged to include tort law justifications with an economic basis. These economic models have been assigned modifiers such as “law and economics” or “efficiency-deterrence” or “cheapest cost avoider.” As a general proposition, the economic paradigms suggest that the informed and rational individual will make decisions that tend to ensure that the benefits he enjoys by his activities are not outweighed by the sum total of the internalized potential liability costs, including secondary and social costs.

The uneasy heterogeneity existing between the “corrective justice” and the “efficiency” models for tort norms is but one of the modern fault lines in the field. The movement, once seemingly inexorable, from fault-based liability to strict liability is now seen to have produced tort rules of responsibility that are either only nominally “strict,” are limited to the most select of circumstances, or both.