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7 Harv. L. Rev. 315 (1893-1894)
Responsiblity for Tortious Acts Its History

handle is hein.journals/hlr7 and id is 325 raw text is: HARVARD LAW REVIEW. VOL. VII. JANUARY 25, 1894. NO. 6. RESPONSIBILITY FOR TORTIOUS ACTS: ITS HISTORY. Not infrequently do the records of the related laws serve as the sole resource, or the safest one, for a methodical explanation of dark and doubtful topics in the legal development of our own native system. BRUNNER: Deutsche Rechtsgeschicht, i. 2. \.TO conception can be understood except through its history, Nosays the Positivist philosopher; and of no legal concep- tion in Anglo-American law is this more true than of the notion of Responsibility for Tortious Acts. By this phrase is indicated that circumstance or group of circumstances attending the initia- tion and eventuation of an acknowledged harmful result, which induces us to make one person rather than another (or than no one at all) civilly amenable to the law as the source of the harmful result (and independently of whether this person can show some recog- nized justification for the harm); and it is this notion whose his- tory we find it possible to trace back in a continuous development in our Germanic law, without a break, for at least two thousand years. To get a starting-point, let us look back from present principles. The law t6-day, so far as we are entitled to take it as standing on a rational basis, distinguishes classes of cases which may be roughly generalized for present purposes as follows: (i) Cases where the source of harm is pure misadventure, as where a cus-

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