1 Front Matter 1 Front Matter
1.1 Acknowledgments 1.1 Acknowledgments
This open-access casebook could not have come to fruition without the generous support of numerous individuals and institutions. Foremost among them is the leadership of the Indiana University Libraries Course Material Fellowship Program. The CMFP provided both financial assistance and invaluable editorial and technical expertise—support without which this book would not exist in its present form. I am especially grateful to Sarah Hare and Haley Janelle Norris for their exceptional guidance, patience, and commitment to open-access pedagogy.
I am equally indebted to the Jerome Hall Law Library at the Maurer School of Law and its outstanding team of librarians, whose support throughout the research and editorial process was indispensable.
My thanks also extend to the Library Innovation Lab (LIL) at Harvard Law School. This book was developed using LIL’s H2O Opencasebook.org platform, a powerful and thoughtfully designed tool that made the creation of this resource not only possible but a genuine pleasure. I strongly encourage law faculty across the country to embrace the open educational resource movement and the transformative potential it holds for legal education.
Most of all, I wish to thank the students who brought this book to life. Sunny Gandhi, Drew Green, Karlie Hinton, Emma Leonard, Joseph Mekis, and Peyton Rayburn—students at the Maurer School of Law and across Indiana University—served as research assistants during the development of this project. Their diligence, insight, and creativity shaped much of the core material contained herein.
A special word of gratitude goes to Graham Vogtman, one of the most remarkable students I have had the privilege to teach. Graham not only acted as the unofficial research lead for this book but also served as its inaugural teaching assistant during the pilot rollout. His rigorous editing, doctrinal analysis, and contributions to the book’s development were nothing short of extraordinary. From refining case selections to honing the clarity and precision of the accompanying notes and questions, Graham played a central role in shaping both the structure and tone of the casebook.
I also benefited greatly from conversations with colleagues here at the Maurer School of Law who generously shared their pedagogical insights, doctrinal expertise, and feedback on early drafts. Their willingness to engage in thoughtful dialogue about both the substance and structure of this casebook helped sharpen its focus and deepen its value. I am also grateful for the informal network of torts professors whose own open educational casebooks, teaching materials, and classroom innovations served as inspiration throughout this process. Legal education is, at its best, a collaborative endeavor, and this book is the product of precisely that spirit.
Torts is not merely a body of rules; it is a moral vocabulary for reckoning with injury. It asks what duties we owe one another as members of a shared society, and what justice demands when those duties are breached. There are few greater privileges than introducing students to this field on their very first day of law school—when the study of torts begins, as it should, with the question: When does the law make one person answer for the harm suffered by another?
~ Asaf Lubin, June 1, 2025
1.2 Introduction 1.2 Introduction
Welcome to Torts!
Welcome to the first-year course in Torts, the study of civil wrongs. This course offers a sustained exploration of private law remedies for harm arising from both intentional and accidental conduct. Over the semester, we will examine the legal mechanisms—developed by courts and legislatures—for assigning responsibility among private parties when one person’s conduct causes injury to another. At the heart of our inquiry lies a fundamental question: when, and under what circumstances, does the law entitle one private citizen to obtain monetary relief from another?
We will study what it takes to prevail in a tort action: the doctrinal elements, theoretical foundations, and policy considerations that animate tort law. Alongside foundational cases, we will also encounter the occasional anachronism, doctrinal oddity, or legal relic. Some of these rules have fallen out of favor, and others are making a surprising comeback. From shoppers slipping on rogue pizza slices in a Target aisle to municipalities sued over monkeys escaping from understaffed zoos, tort law is a parade of the improbable.. But alongside the eccentric fact patterns lie some of the most serious questions in law—about causation, intent, and the boundaries of responsibility in everyday life.
Book Overview
Most commercial law textbooks are exorbitantly priced, often composed of case law readily available in the public domain, and physically unwieldy. In response, and in collaboration with Indiana University Libraries, I developed this casebook as an open educational resource (OER) designed to meet the needs of today’s law students—intellectually, pedagogically, and practically. It is hosted on the Opencasebook.org platform developed by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School and is published and updated regularly through Indiana Publishing.
This is the second class to use this new casebook. It has been designed with your experience in mind: to be more accessible in language, broader in coverage, and more adaptable to contemporary developments than traditional commercial casebooks. It contains all required readings, practice questions, and study notes. No purchases of external materials are necessary.
Most chapters follow a consistent format:
- Principal material: typically, a judicial opinion or excerpt from a scholarly article. This is the core of each chapter and should be read carefully—ideally more than once. It contains much of the doctrinal substance on which our class discussions will focus.
- A “fun fact”: a brief contextual note about the case—often about the parties or the setting—to provide color and background.
- Guiding questions: reading comprehension and analytical prompts to help you focus on what matters most in the principal material. These questions often track the kinds of inquiries we will raise in class.
- “Test-your-knowledge” multiple choice question: a short, often hypothetical-based question designed to reinforce key doctrinal concepts. You are encouraged to complete these before class. Answers to these questions appear in the back of the book.
- Notes and further cases: supplemental commentary and comparative cases expanding on the central themes of the chapter. These notes will inform class discussion and are part of the required reading necessary for the final exam.
A Note on AI Assistance in the Development of this Casebook: In the preparation of this casebook, including the generation of certain images and explanatory text, OpenAI’s ChatGPT—specifically Module 4o—was utilized as a research and drafting aid. All substantive content was initially developed by the author and a team of research assistants. ChatGPT was subsequently employed to assist in refining language, clarifying explanations, and creating visual representations of fact patterns. All AI-assisted outputs were subject to thorough review and editing by the author to ensure accuracy and pedagogical effectiveness. The author retains full responsibility for the content and any errors or omissions therein.