Torts is a subject that is in flux. If one were to read Blackstone or another 18th century treatise, torts would be the subject of private wrongs. And most of Blackstone is focused on the intentional torts with very little negligence. Torts as a subject area undergoes significant change from the Industrial Revolution with the developments of railroads and machinery, accidents displace intentional torts as the primary area of tort law. And this has created conceptual questions about what tort law exactly is. Some scholars continue to believe that tort law is the domain of private wrongdoing and stands in contrast to criminal law, which involves public wrongs. Others think that defining torts as a form of wrongdoing is either antiquated or wrong, and that tort law is how we allocate the cost of accidents. So, in a world in which we have machines that injure people, and people do negligent actions, accidents invariably arise and we have to allocate the cost of them. And some others have argued that tort law is how we regulate conduct, that tort law is simply another form of regulatory law. That by imposing strict liability, for example, on certain ultra hazardous activities, we control how those activities are done. Or by imposing strict liability for certain product defects, we regulate the marketplace of those products. So tort law does have a regulatory aspect. Yale Law School today teaches tort law as tort and regulatory law as though tort is a branch of regulatory law. Other scholars like Goldberg and Zipurksky vigorously dispute this characterization of tort law. But tort law, because it is in many ways a hodgepodge, tort law involves private duties that don't arise from contract, but that's a pretty thin definition. So there's not the same kind of consensus of exactly what tort law is doing that you might find in some other fields. There is a division among scholars about whether tort law is properly the law of private wrongdoing, whether it is allocating the cost of accidents, or whether it is regulating behavior.