Back in the early days, tort law would allow you to claim for very very obvious and very violent actions against you.
You know, if somebody committed a battery against you and, and hurt your body or, or broke your things you could bring a claim for that. That was the sort of thing that tort law recognized.
But as society has changed the sorts of things that we think it's reasonable to require somebody to compensate you for have changed too. And so the law now applies not just to intentional uses of force, but to what I refer to as negligence or, or what the law refers to as negligence.
If somebody accidentally hurts you because they weren't as careful as they should have been, well you can recover for that.
And the law also now covers things or applies the law of torts, applies to things like product liability.
If you're injured by a product that you bought that wasn't designed as well as it should have been, it was designed and it was too dangerous or, or maybe it was manufactured and it has a defect in it that causes it to, to hurt you.
Those sorts of things. Now, the law has, has evolved to change. And what's interesting about tort law is that it's in many cases it's not the action of the legislature that has pressed the law to change it has been gradually the courts saying, well historically, maybe a claim wasn't available for this.
But the world has changed now, and, and we, we, the judges have a responsibility to ensure that that remedies keep pace with societal change.
And so for instance product liability law kind of grew out of the, the 1950s and sixties and some thinking about, about the risks that new products increasingly caused a consumers, that wasn't an action of the legislature in most contexts.
That was just the court saying, well, let's, let's expand negligence doctrine a little bit to apply to this new set of facts, this new product liability where people are getting hurt by mass manufactured products.
And so we, we want them to have recourse for that. And so that's what's so interesting about the way that tort law changes over time. It's, it's not exclusively controlled by judges.
The legislatures can and, and very often do intervene for particular changes, but judges retain the power even today to shape the common law to fit new contexts.