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Goldberg's Arguments Against Tort Reform

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[T]ort is best understood as a law for the redress of private wrongs. Taking seriously tort's structure, vocabulary and 'grammar', leads one to grasp that the point of this body of law is to articulate duties of conduct that individuals and entities owe to one another, and to empower those injured by breaches of these duties (i.e., by wrongs) to invoke the law to go after their wrongdoers. Tort law, in other words, is best theorized as a special kind of victims' rights law. As such, it promises to deliver various goods within our liberal-constitutional system of government apart from deterrence and compensation, even though it will sometimes deliver those as well. In particular, it reinforces and refines norms of responsible conduct, helps sustain a distinctively liberal notion of civil society, assures citizens that government is committed to attend to their complaints on a more or less individualized basis, and avoids excessive reliance on top-down regulation.6 …show more content…

In a sense, his thoughts give a type of measuring tool to determine whether the reforms, made or proposed, will better assist the tort system in accomplishing its goals.
This Article will address a wide variety of arguments for and against tort reform, and will discuss possible solutions to improve the current tort system. My purpose in writing this Article is not to offer a definitive solution to the tort reform debate, but instead to accurately present and analyze tort reform issues in the hope that someday a "wise agreement"7 will be negotiated that meets the needs of all parties involved in the tort

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