Product Description

This easy-to-use doctrinal favorite incorporates many cases decided within the last several years. It emphasizes personal injury torts, including civil rights torts, but also covers non-tort systems of compensation, including social security and workers' compensation. Several chapters deal with current medical malpractice and products liability law. (The malpractice chapter has a new section on nursing home liability.) Shorter chapters cover economic and dignitary torts such as defamation, privacy, fraud and others. In approach, this book attempts to present basic concepts such as duty, negligence, cause, scope of risk, and comparative responsibility by using cases and notes that ask for thoughtful analysis and synthesis, as well as respect for facts and policy. The book also investigates such current issues as tort reform and apportionment of responsibility.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19706 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1167 pages

About the Author
Dan B. Dobbs, University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law; Paul T. Hayden, Loyola Law School

Customer Reviews

Good job on the content, editing and flow need a little work
I am using this book currently in my torts class. The content is solid however the editing is poor. Grammatical errors can be found throughout the text.

Inefficient, mediocre collection of cases
As a first year law student, nobody told me about that some of the books that we are asked to read are not meant to be useful learning aids. I bought this book and did my readings faithfully and diligently for the first couple months of school. Please, do not make the same mistake that I did!

Don't use this book as your primary method to learn torts unless you enjoy wasting time and don't want a life outside of the dreary halls of your law school.

The book is incredibly inefficient. It introduces you to concepts and details of areas of tort law at a snail's pace. You'll spend 3 or 4 hours of reading and briefing cases to pick up what you could have learned in 15 minutes of reading a Casebrief, Gilbert, or Emanuel outline. The explanations between cases is mediocre, posing more questions than answers. And the book does not provide answers to the problems and hypotheticals that it asks.

As a first year law student, the professors will decieve you and tell you that you will learn more if you do all of the readings, brief the cases, and participate in the Socratic Method learning style. Big lie! In reality, volumes of scholarly pieces have been devoted to exposing the myth of the Casebook/Socratic/Langdellian method of education for the inefficient joke that it is. But your professors will ask you to be a good little law student and read your Torts and Compensation, and brief your cases.

If you make the mistake of believing them, like I did, you will find yourself studying over 50 hours a week and will only have a medicore understanding of the material.

Ignore your professors' mad rants, buy an outline book, spend 15 hours a week studying instead of 50, and have a masterful understanding of the material. Part of this strategy I outlined is ignoring this textbook. It's tailor made for the antiquated inefficiencies of the Socratic Method and all of the time wasting that goes along with it.

If your professor assigned this book to you, you probably don't have a choice and MUST buy it. If you value your time, AND want to learn torts successfully, buy a book that is keyed to this textbook and has summaries of all of the cases (in case you get called on). Look at a hornbook or a Gilbert or Emanuel outline to get a framework of Tort law. This textbook is a big waste of time. There are better, faster, more complete ways to learn torts. This book is just a detour, a weapon that first year law professors will use to make your first semester rites-of-passage as difficult as possible.

Worst Torts book ever
I used this book during my first year of law school and found it utterly useless. Aside from the terrible editing, the material is not all that well organized and the book is full of little "mini-cases" which present you with random little holdings of tort law. Furthermore, I found the analysis on some of the more important cases to be deficient.