ABSTRACT
Among the traditional first-year law school subjects, tort law seems to be relatively well situated to reflect the diversity of individuals’ lives, as it takes into account the social context within which private disputes occur. Its core subject matter includes injuries to people’s bodies, the right to physical integrity, and bodily inviolability. With the expansion of the modern law of negligence, tort law has gained a means by which relationships between actors can be analysed to determine whether the behaviour of the defendant within the relationship conforms to societal expectations. Negligence, in contrast to the intentional torts, requires analysis of the relatedness of people, or of people and institutions, and requires the imaginative process of placing oneself in various real and hypothetical positions.1 Negligence law exhibits a more complex form of reasoning, which explains why it has acquired a greater potential to respond to the cultural pluralism of the late 20th century. As Ann Scales argues:
Does tort law, and negligence law in particular, take account of the social reality of women’s situations in society? Does it handle constructively, or merely reflect, the unequal nature of society? Negligence law continues to be problematic from a feminist point of view. The goals of tort law do not include the achievement of equality or distributive justice. The more modest goals are compensation and deterrence, sometimes accompanied by punishment.3 Accepting these goals for the moment, one can analyse how well tort law achieves its goals for members of disadvantaged groups.
