American Tort Law: Shining Beacon?

Abstract

After attending ninety of Prosser's classes, indeed after only a dozen or so, I was hooked. I couldn't help it. I became, and remain to this day, a tortaholic who gets no kick from champagne but who still gets a kick out of torts. No Malibu rehab center can cure me from my addiction to torts. Also to blame for my hopeless condition was Prosser's anointed successor, the great John Fleming, author of the Commonwealth's Bible on British tort law,' who taught the same torts course at Berkeley to another section, in which I also participated, joyfully, as the moustache-wearing Fleming mischievously bounded around the classroom emphasizing his points and scaring the students. Can you imagine how thrilled I was? I loved it. I looked forward to every class! Even to the examinations!

I was captivated by the subject-its capacity to help the injured; the fascinating, human cases, many memorialized in Rabin and Sugarman's collection, Torts Stories;4 the odd characters described in the cases; the great judges who, often poetically, penned the notable cases-Cardozo, Holmes, Traynor, Hand, Friendly; and the great scholars of the period who produced the leading books and articles-Francis Bohlen, Warren Seavey, Leon Green, Clarence Morris, Fowler Harper, Fleming James, John Wade, Willard Pedrick, Wex Malone, Harry Kalven, and others.

Prosser and Fleming became my heroes and, inexplicably, took an interest in me and encouraged me to become a law professor at Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School, my alma mater, to write a treatise and to edit a casebook on Canadian Tort Law, which I undertook to do, did do, and, miraculously, am still engaged in doing.