The General Tort Law of Personal Injuries
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PART IV
PERSONAL INJURY (TORT) LAW
The General Tort Law of Personal Injuries*
By REGINALD PARKER,** Professor of Law, University of Arkansas
I. Brief Historical Survey
The law of retribution for wrongs is in every civilization the
oldest part of organized law. Originally indistinguishable from
criminal law, tort law begins to emerge as a body of law in its own
right at the more advanced stage of legal civilization. Among the
torts for which indemnity may be sought, unlawful attack on the
person of a free man has played a most prominent role.
The law of the Romans gave a right of recovery to anybody
who suffered from the result of an iniuria, a term whose meaning
at the time of the Twelve Tables (about 450 B.C.) was confined to
personal injuries in our sense of the word. As usual, the still primi-
tive law had a kind of tariff setting forth how much the plaintiff
could recover for the loss of one or both limbs, a broken leg, etc.
The action developed later into the actio iniuriarum aestimatoria,
which gave the judge discretion to set the penalty - and as such
it was conceived, rather than as an action for damages - for any
injury to the person through bodily mistreatment, violation
of the plaintiff's honor, defamation, - in short, any disregard of
another's personal sphere. I The old action for trespass to personal
* This is the first of two lectures given in May 1951 by Prof. Parker at the
School of Law, Univ. of Arkansas as the Belli Sr. Lecturer in Personal Injury
(Tort) Law, sponsored by NACCA and this Journal. Our lecturers are at all
times free to express their own views, whether they agree or differ from those
of NACCA.
** LL.B., Univ. of Vienna, 1926; J.D., Univ. of Vienna, 1927; member of
the bars of D.C. and Ill., Professor of Law, Univ. of Arkansas, 1949-51; Author:
Administrative Law: A Text (Bobbs-Merrill, 1951); Questions and Answers on
Labor Law (2d ed., Claridge Pub., 1951); numerous articles in legal periodicals.
At present one of the home office editors of the NACCA Law Journal.
1 Including even the right to privacy, to be let alone, so often sadly neg-
lected in our country. Cf. Pavesich v. New England Life Ins. Co., 122 Ga.
190, 50 S. E. 68 (1905).
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The General Tort Law of Personal Injuries
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