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To injury is human
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Terms like “tort” have been around for hundreds of years. The Romans gave it to the French (from the Latin word for twisted) and the French gave it to the English (from the Old French word for a wrong). The English--who adopted a lot of French words during the five hundred years or so when the two countries squabbled over real estate--decided it was a great name to give to the type of injury that has employed lawyers for centuries.
The name may be out-of-date and out-of-use except by lawyers, law students and the occasional linguist, but the human capacity to find different ways to injury is always evolving. New torts, or new twists on old torts keep evolving as well. The law is constantly trying to keep pace with the changing world.
Sometimes it even tries to jump ahead of the world and legislate (just legal jargon for passing laws) to save people from injuries before they even happen. Sometimes the legislators take a jump in the wrong direction and end up creating laws to regulate situations that never occur. There are a lot of laws on the books that are seldom, if ever, used. It seems they didn’t reflect human nature, although they did reflect the paranoia of the legislators.
Torts on the other hand, are all about human nature. Whatever new technology or amusement comes along, the activity will invariably bring both benefit and injury with it. Take Twitter, sure it is great fun, but some tweets can also hurt people’s feelings or may damage the careers of celebrities. An article in the Denver Post talks about the trouble certain professional athletes may find themselves in due to some of their tweets.
Because the idea of injury keeps changing, tort law is a “figure it out as we go along,” type of thing. At one time, trespass was a very popular tort--now, you don’t find many (any?) lawsuits based it. On the other hand, identity theft can be the start of whole new branch of tort law. Like a grassroots movement, it develops slowly, dealing with what is happening in daily life to ordinary people.
As long as people, whether intentionally or unintentionally hurt each other, the law will find ways to make it up to injured party-or at least try to..
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