Three by Tilley

Cristina Tilley has posted three pieces to SSRN.  First, Impaired, in Pairs.  The abstract provides:

Rape, like many other one-on-one aggressions, can be treated as both a crime and a tort. But neither body of law responds effectively to these aggressions. Criminal rape prosecution is notoriously difficult, and civil rape suits are notoriously rare. Today, as private law theorists have begun to study tort’s potential to drive social justice on issues of race, gender, and class, it is an ideal time to reassess the terms of civil liability for intimate injury. Culture has long limited “real rape” to premeditated, stranger-on-stranger, aggression. Consequently, tort has long categorized what this Essay terms “non-collaborative sex” as an intentional tort in which a predator strategically targets a plaintiff whose autonomy will be negated. The modern reality – that many, if not most, rapes take place between drunken acquaintances whose cognition and judgment have been dulled – is underaccounted for in modern tort doctrine. This Article urges a new look at tort’s categorization of wrongdoing in non-collaborative sex. The reflexive assumption that sexual wronging is intentional has placed the weight of sexual assault adjudication on the question of female consent. And while tort doctrine appears willing to acknowledge that sex often goes wrong when drugs and alcohol are involved, it takes a curiously gendered approach to the role that impairment plays. How so? The Restatement of Tort fixates on holding women responsible when they drunkenly, but mistakenly, signal consent. But it does not consider whether to hold men responsible when they drunkenly, but mistakenly, conclude they have consent. When both parties are cognitively dulled in this fashion, it may be doctrinally unprincipled to say that either has the capacity to intend their actions. If so, the Article suggests, physical oppression associated with non-collaborative, intoxicated, sex might be better placed in the tort categories of negligence or strict liability, where cognitive purpose is not the sine qua non of wrongdoing.

Second, A New Private Law of Policing.  The abstract provides:

American law and American life are asymmetrical. Law divides neatly in two: public and private. But life is lived in three distinct spaces: pure public, pure private, and hybrid middle spaces that are neither state nor home. Which body of law governs the shops, gyms, and workplaces that are formally accessible to all, but functionally hostile to Black, female, poor, and other marginalized Americans? From the liberal midcentury onward, social justice advocates have treated these spaces as fundamentally public and fully remediable via public law equity commands. This article takes a broader view. It urges a tort law revival in the campaign for just middle spaces, taking as its exemplar the problem of racially oppressive policing. Inequitable policing arises from both system-level policies and personal officer biases. Public law can remake systems, but struggles to remake people. Consequently, this piece argues that the legal quest for humane policing has overemphasized public law litigation under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 and underemphasized the private law of tort. Personal injury law, specifically the intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED) tort, has untapped potential to influence the private bias of officers and the communities they serve. IIED invites individuation of Black litigants, self-reflection on the meaning of racial dignity in middle spaces, and construction of shared norms about civilian humanity—a panoply of exercises social psychologists have identified as the essential tools of anti-bias work. Returning to broader themes, the article builds on the example of inequitable policing to petition for full private law partnership in the bid for twenty-first century social justice.

Third, Living as One:  Tort Law and a Duty to Imagine.  The abstract provides:

From the nation’s founding until the present day, tort has been a body of law concerned with the construction of American community. Courts in the first era of American tort decided neighbor-to-neighbor conflicts according to local morality. Over time, scholars and judges managing industrial growth shifted to a second era of American tort, focused on assigning the cost of risks between economic strangers. And as the twenty-first century churns forward, it may be time for a third era of tort – one dedicated to forging social cohesion between diverse identity groups. But if tort is going to rise to the twenty-first century challenge of repairing social fracture, it may have to shuffle off notions of duty adopted by and for actors aspiring to market might. Put simply, modern Americans may no longer owe each other just a duty to foresee the physical impact of their conduct, but also a duty to imagine the dignitary impact of their conduct on fellow participants in the national community.