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53 Wake Forest L. Rev. 293 (2018)
When Cars Crash: The Automobile's Tort Law Legacy

handle is hein.journals/wflr53 and id is 309 raw text is: WHEN CARS CRASH: THE AUTOMOBILE'S TORT LAW LEGACY Nora Freeman Engstrom* Everyone understands that the invention of the automobile has had a profound effect on daily life in America. It has transformed our workplaces, altered our neighborhoods, and radically changed our environment. But cars have never been perfectly safe, and, as the years have passed, injuries and fatalities have mounted. This Article contends that, just as motor vehicles have remade our culture, these injuries and deaths-some 3.5 million fatalities and counting-have catalyzed fundamental changes in the contours, purposes, and limits of our law. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODU CTION .......................................................................... 294 II. SETTING THE STAGE: COMMON BUT NOT TYPICAL .................. 299 A. Contemporary Auto Claims Practices: Frequently Filed and Easily Resolved ................................................ 299 B. Comparatively Uncontroversial ....................................... 303 C. But One Strand in a Complex Regulatory Fabric ........... 305 D. More Evidence for Multiple Worlds ................................. 308 III. OUR SECOND MOST AMBITIOUS EXPERIMENT WITH NO-FAULT COMPENSATION ...................................................... 309 IV. SOURCE OF DOCTRINAL EVOLUTION AND THEORETICAL INSIGHT ............................................................. 315 A. Doctrinal Evolution ..................................................... 315 1. Rules v. Standards and Jury v. Judge ...................... 316 a. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co. v. Goodman ...... 316 b. Pokora v. Wabash Railway Co ............................. 317 c. The Cases' Legacies .............................................. 319 2. Dealt the Death Blow to Contributory Negligence ..... 320 3. Progenitor of Enabling Torts ...................................... 324 B. Theoretical Insight: Incontrovertible Evidence of the Information-Forcing Function of Tort Law ..................... 328 * Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Curriculum, and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School. I am grateful to David Freeman Engstrom, Michael Green, and Robert Rabin for helpful comments and to Nathan Werksman for tireless research assistance. All errors are mine. 293

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