A tort is a civil wrong — an act or omission that causes harm to another person and for which the law provides a remedy, typically monetary compensation. Tort law is distinct from criminal law: the state prosecutes crimes, but injured parties bring tort claims. The same act (an assault, for example) can be both a crime and a tort, prosecuted by the state and sued for by the victim.
The major categories of tort are intentional torts (assault, battery, defamation, trespass — deliberate harmful acts), negligence (failure to exercise reasonable care that results in harm), and strict liability (liability regardless of fault, applied to abnormally dangerous activities and defective products). Negligence is by far the largest category, covering everything from car accidents to medical malpractice to slip-and-fall cases.
Tort law’s stated purpose is compensation — making the injured party whole. But its sociological function is broader: it distributes risk. The question “who should bear the cost of this harm?” is not answered by nature; it is answered by legal rules that reflect policy choices. Strict liability for product defects shifts risk from consumers to manufacturers. Workers’ compensation systems shift risk from individual employees to employers (and their insurers). The choice to make a harm compensable through tort law rather than absorbing it through social insurance, ignoring it, or preventing it through regulation is itself a policy decision with distributional consequences.
The tort reform movement — efforts to cap damages, limit class actions, and restrict access to courts — reveals the political stakes. Tort reform is backed primarily by industries facing liability exposure (medical, manufacturing, pharmaceutical) and framed as reducing frivolous litigation. Critics argue that it reduces access to justice for injured people while protecting the entities most likely to cause harm.
Related terms
- Contract — the other major branch of private law
- Adjudication — the process through which tort claims are resolved
- Sanction — the remedies that tort law provides
- Rights — the interests that tort law protects