Esq. M. Stuart Madden
Tort Law & How It’s Tied to Our Culture is a socio-legal history of the norms, customs, and eventual private laws for wrongs, or Tort. Oliver Wendell Holmes described law as 'a grand anthropological document.' This can be said with even greater force of Tort Law, the most dynamic field within the Common Law. Whether in the form of an unwritten lesson of a myth or folktale, or rendered as written law, Tort Law reflects a culture’s superego, a guide to what individuals might forego doing in the interest of a community’s safety, dignity and prosperity. The work provides an entertaining and scholarly tour of Tort Law from its beginnings in the unwritten oral traditions of folktale and myth, through the ancient law codes of Mesopotamia, the cohering work of the Greeks, and the codifications of the Romans and later Gothic groups, to early religious recitations of behavioral ethics. Separate treatment is afforded the vital role of the Common Law in an increasingly statutory age, exemplary or punitive damages and the congruence between the application of tort-type remedies in the English-speaking Common Law nations and the significant number of Civil Code nations applying law more directly descended from Roman Law and the Napoleonic Code.
