A Stitch in Haste

How can you not just love a fact pattern like this?

A Jackson State University official blames pranksters for the mistaken demolition of a house — and everything in it. Owner Annie Wilson of Dallas said trying to get fair compensation has been a nightmare.

Vice president Troy Stovall said Jackson State bought the lot next to hers for potential expansion. He says somebody moved signs with the address and a notice that it belonged to the school onto Wilson’s lot — so the contractor worked at the wrong site.

The 713-square-foot house had been appraised for just over $10,000. The school offered Wilson $8,000 in May. She says someone from the state finance department offered $20,000 on Thursday.

Wilson says she should get at least $30,000, because of all the belongings destroyed.

She says those include antique furniture and handmade quilts.

I could fill a dozen bluebooks on this. Trespass, negligence, conversion, negligent supervision (of both the contractors and the pranksters), vicarious liability, contribution and indemnification, negligent infliction of emotional distress (the contractors and university), intentional infliction of emotional distress (the pranksters). The list is endless. And that’s before the subsequent (but still bluebookable) question of how to measure the damages (cf., “burned and hairy hand“).

Fun stuff (well, for us, if not for unfortunate Mrs. Wilson.)

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In actuality, I think another, more primal reason why torts will always be my first true love is because I’m a libertarian. Put the Constitution aside for just a moment. Torts is, quite frankly, the real law of libertarianism.

All tort law begins with the presumption that your life belongs to you. Modern tort law has expanded (overexpanded?) this basic premise to encompass not only your body (assault, battery) and your property (trespass, conversion), but even your liberty (false imprisonment), your reputation (defamation, false light, image misappropriation), your business interests (interference), and your privacy (intrusion, public disclosure of private facts).

And while it is true that criminal law also concerns itself (sometimes) with “the violation of individual rights,” modern criminal law muddies the waters with questions of rehabilitation and deterrence. Not that there’s anything wrong with seeking to create an environment of rehabilitation and deterrence — it’s just that those goals are secondary from a libertarian perspective. Tort law is far more pure in its libertarian roots. And there is far more potential, by orders of magnitude, for “anti-libertarian” criminal laws than for “anti-libertarian” torts. (Contracts could also be considered “libertarian law” in a sense, but in fact much of contract law turns out to be, at least in my opinion, arbitrary at best and downright un-libertarian at worst. Maybe that will be the subject of a future blogpost. I also wanted to discuss negligence in this post, but I will also leave that for another day.)

It’s unfortunate that lay libertarians have little choice but to limit their exploration into “the law” to constitutional and criminal law. For the foundation of “libertarian law” is clearly torts — and appreciating the logic of tort law is a good, perhaps the best, primer for appreciating the foundations of libertarianism.