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Fault Lines

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Tables and Figures...............................................................................................................................................ixContributors.............................................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: Tort Law as Cultural Practice DAVID M. ENGEL AND MICHAEL MCCANN...........................................................................................11. Law, Liability, and Culture DAVID NELKEN.............................................................................................................................212. Torts and Notions of Community: More Observations on Units of Legal Culture KEEBET VON BENDA-BECKMANN................................................................393. India's Tort Deficit: Sketch for a Historical Portrait MARC GALANTER.................................................................................................474. Liability Insurance at the Tort-Crime Boundary TOM BAKER.............................................................................................................665. Juries as Conduits for Culture? VALERIE P. HANS......................................................................................................................806. Framing Fast-Food Litigation: Tort Claims, Mass Media, and the Politics of Responsibility in the United States WILLIAM HALTOM AND MICHAEL MCCANN.....................977. Discrimination and Outrage: Exploring the Gap Between Civil Rights and Tort Recoveries MARTHA CHAMALLAS..............................................................1198. Regulating Middlesex ANNE BLOOM......................................................................................................................................1379. Whiteness, Equal Treatment, and the Valuation of Injury in Torts, 1900-1949 JENNIFER B. WRIGGINS.....................................................................15610. The Role of Tort Lawsuits in Reconstructing the Issue of Police Abuse in the United Kingdom CHARLES R . EPP.........................................................17511. Lawyers and Solicitors Separated by a Common Legal System: Anti-Tobacco Litigation in the United States and Britain LYNN MATHER.....................................19212. Suing Doctors in Japan: Structure, Culture, and the Rise of Malpractice Litigation ERIC A. FELDMAN..................................................................21113. The Role of the Judiciary in Asbestos Injury Compensation in Japan TAKAO TANASE.....................................................................................233and American Legal Cultures DAVID M. ENGEL..............................................................................................................................25115. "Nobody Broke It, It Just Broke": Causation as an Instrument of Obfuscation and Oppression ANN SCALE S..............................................................26916. The Cultural Agenda of Tort Litigation: Constructing Responsibility in the Rocky Mountain Frontier JOYCE STERLING AND NANCY REICHMAN................................287Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................................................309Notes....................................................................................................................................................................311Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................329Cases, Statutes, and Agency Reports......................................................................................................................................361Index....................................................................................................................................................................365

Chapter One

Few legal domains are as obviously promising for "cultural" analysis as torts, revolving as they do around questions of risk, fault, blame, responsibility, and the limits of the duty to care. Cause and effect can be defined and connected in a wide variety of ways, and attributions of such linkages are shaped (collectively and individually) by where one wants blame to end up. The contributions to this volume show that inquiries into tort law and culture can cover a wide range of topics concerned with culture in tort law, tort law in culture, and tort law as culture. Cultural approaches can provide insight into the role of this kind of law, and studies of different ways of dealing with liability in different societies can highlight their cultural differences.

Notoriously, however, the term culture can be used in many ways, ranging from referring to what is most taken for granted to that which is most manipulated. When we are faced with such protean terms as law and culture, the variety of meanings and possible interconnections is almost too large to be mapped. My interest here is only to consider how far the term legal culture can be used to add conceptual clarity to this effort to map some of the relationships between law and culture. Some of the contributors actually say that this is their aim: Lynn Mather, for example, tells us that "Tobacco litigation provides an excellent lens for comparative research on legal cultures." But other contributions may also provide us with useful illustrations for this purpose even where the concept is not referred to explicitly. Legal culture can be relevant to their attempts to disclose the different and partially competing cultures that are reflected in any given system of attributions, to trace how the willingness to attach blame for tortlike behavior changes over time, as well as, most obviously, to compare the way liability for harm is attached in different places. Using a framework I have set out elsewhere, I shall first say something about what is meant by the term legal culture, and then discuss, in turn, the units of legal culture and the role it plays in explanations.

What Is Legal Culture?

Legal culture, in its most general sense, is one way of describing relatively stable patterns of legally oriented social behavior and attitudes. The identifying elements of legal culture range from facts about institutions such as the number and role of lawyers or the ways judges are appointed and controlled, to various forms of behavior such as litigation or prison rates, and, at the other extreme, more nebulous aspects of ideas, values, aspirations, and mentalities. Like culture itself, legal culture is about who we are and not just what we do.

Inquiries into legal culture try to understand puzzling features of the role and the rule of law within given societies. Why do the United Kingdom and Denmark complain most about the imposition of European Union law but then turn out to be the countries that have the best records of obedience? Conversely, why does Italy, whose public opinion is most in favor of Europe, have such a high rate of noncompliance? Why does Holland, otherwise so similar, have such a low litigation rate compared...