Whiteness, Equal Treatment, and the Valuation of Injury in Torts, 1900-1949

Distributive Justice through Tort (and Why Sociolegal Scholars Should Care)

“…Numerous prescriptions concerning tort law take up the progressive invitation and fill Fault Lines . Make tort fairer to African American litigants, urges Jennifer Wriggins (2009). Integrate it with a civil rights agenda, proposes Martha Chamallas (2009a).…”

“…The participants boundary receives another investigation in Fault Lines when Jennifer Wriggins (2009) (coauthor with Martha Chamallas of a recent book called The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender and the Law of Torts ) explores “Whiteness, Equal Treatment, and the Valuation of Injury in Torts, 1900–1949.” During the half‐century that Wriggins studies, African American citizens could not participate in personal injury adjudication as jurors or judges (157); only the roles of witnesses and litigants were open to them. Forced onto the disadvantaged side of a binary, African Americans experienced race‐based detriments in tort long after the end of de jure segregation.…”

“…The Fault Lines chapters by Wriggins (2009) and Chamallas (2009a) invite reformers to consider “torts, egalitarianism and distributive justice” with respect to race. By bracketing her findings inside the years 1900 to 1949, Wriggins situates race‐based disadvantage in tort's past, but, elsewhere, she has shown how these injustices persist (Wriggins 1997, 2005).…”