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Modern day vicarious liability cases often address the liability of enterprises and institutions whose agents have committed intentional acts. Increasingly, when employers are sued, the line is blurred between the principal's vicarious liability for its agent's acts and its own direct liability for hiring and/or failing to supervise or control its agent. From an economic deterrence perspective, the imposition of vicarious liability induces employers to adopt cost-justified preventative measures, including selective hiring and more stringent supervision and discipline, and, in some instances, to truncate the scope of their business activities. Negligence-based direct liability likewise induces employers to adopt cost-justified preventative measures (without constraining activity levels to the degree that strict liability does). This raises questions. Why doesn't direct employer negligence liability suffice, in terms of deterring employees' intentional torts? Or conversely, so long as there is vicarious liability, is there any need for direct negligence liability at all? In this Article, I argue that, as a form of strict liability, vicarious liability will have an edge over direct employer negligence liability to the extent that there is a significant risk of under-detection of the failures of an employer's preventative measures. Traces of this under-detection rationale for vicarious liability can be found in the academic literature and court decisions, but it warrants further elaboration. The risk of under-detection provides a strong justification for the expansion of the scope of institutional or employer vicarious liability. The under-detection rationale, moreover, has the potential to serve as a coherent framework for some modern doctrinal debates, including whether punitive damages should be imposed either vicariously or directly upon employers when their employees commit intentional torts. Specifically, I argue that the under-detection rationale correspondingly strengthens the case for punitive damages in direct negligence cases and weakens the case for punitive damages imposed in vicarious liability cases. Focusing on under-detection, vicarious liability acts as a quasi-substitute for punitive damages. And seen through this lens, Restatement (Second) of Torts § 909, Punitive Damages Against a Principal--typically defended as a "complicity rule" limiting the imposition of vicarious punitive liability on fairness grounds--is justified on economic deterrence grounds by allowing punitive damages coupled with direct negligence liability but limiting its operation in the vicarious liability sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Law Institute's Third Restatement of Torts was initially conceived as a series of separate projects, each with its own reporters. From 1998 through 2010, the ALI completed and published three different segments: Products Liability, Apportionment of Liability, and Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm. Initially, the ALI did not intend to restate the intentional torts, believing that the Second Restatement's treatment of these torts was clear and largely authoritative. It was ultimately persuaded that there were numerous unresolved issues that needed to be addressed. As a result, it authorized a new project on Intentional Torts--a project that is currently ongoing. Rather than applaud or critique the specific choice the reporters are making, I have chosen to discuss two broader concerns regarding the project. The first concern is that the piecemeal nature of assembling all the separate projects of the Third Restatement of Torts (including the review and adoption of different sections within Intentional Torts) has made the Intentional Torts reporters' task more difficult than it should have been and may contribute to an overall product that is flawed in important respects, primarily because of inconsistencies that cannot easily be corrected. The second concern is that the Intentional Torts reporters have too often lost sight of the conceptual distinctions between intentional and nonintentional torts. Although I agree that these conceptual distinctions should not have driven the basic organization of the project, as was once suggested, I argue that the reporters are making doctrinal decisions that further blur, rather than clarify, the boundaries between the intentional torts and other torts, primarily negligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the most recent draft of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Intentional Torts to Persons, the intentional torts protect the rightholder's interests differently from negligence-based rules and strict liability, placing them into a distinct substantive category. This conceptualization, however, does not provide courts with adequate guidance on how to formulate the element of intent. Different formulations can protect the rightholder's interests differently from negligence and strict liability, so something else must determine the appropriate way to formulate the element of intent. The draft Restatement's reasoning can be easily extended to provide a more useful conceptualization of the intentional torts. The practice of tort law involves the enforcement of behavioral norms, and so the substantive categories of tort law should correspond to normatively distinguishable categories of behavior. For tort purposes, three different paradigmatic forms of social behavior are relevant: aggressive interactions; interactions of mutual advantage; and the remaining nonaggressive, risk-creating interactions that are not motivated by an expectation of mutual benefit. Within this normative framework, the category of intentional torts is defined by aggressive interactions, which involve intentional harms that are normatively different from accidental harms. The intentional torts accordingly protect different interests in a distinctive manner as per the rationale in the draft Restatement. This normative framework straightforwardly explains a number of established rules while also resolving two questions of intent that have vexed courts and commentators. Difficult issues of intent involve hard questions about how the conduct is best categorized for tort purposes. Once the categories have been conceptualized in behavioral terms, the element of intent has a clear substantive purpose: it determines whether or not an interaction is aggressive and properly governed by the intentional torts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various legal aspects of intentional torts against the person in Australia, focusing on the concept of negligence in Australia, as well as information about the elements of torts and analyses of several legal cases. The writ of trespass is addressed, along with damages under Australian law. According to the article, battery, assault, and false imprisonment are three separate intentional torts against the person. Intent, voluntariness, and recklessness are examined.

The article focuses on the sex exception in vicarious liability tort litigation in the U.S. Topics include the widespread sexual abuse of children by members of the Catholic Church, if institutions can be held liable for the misdeeds of their members, and tort law in the U.S. Information is provided on compensation for intentional torts.

Although Title VII is often described as a "statutory tort," that label has, until recently, been mostly metaphorical. In Staub v. Proctor Hospital, however, the Supreme Court took an important step in incorporating concepts from tort law into the antidiscrimination statutes. Although Staub received some attention as a "cat's paw" (or subordinate bias) liability decision, it will have broader significance for two reasons. First, the Court explicitly adopted tort law's definition of "intent" for statutory discrimination cases, thus raising a threshold question of what it means to "intend to discriminate." This Article suggests that, rather than widening the notion of discriminatory intent, which Staub at first blush seems to do, the opinion actually adds another layer to the plaintiff's burden: for liability, the decisionmaker must now both have the requisite wrongful motivation and either desire a resulting "adverse employment action" or believe that such an action is substantially certain to occur. Second, and potentially more important, Staub for the first time imported the concept of proximate cause into the antidiscrimination context from its usual home in negligence law. Such a transplant is especially remarkable because proximate cause was unnecessary for resolving the case before the Court. The only purpose of adding a proximate cause requirement is to limit liability short of the full reach of but-for causation, and limiting employer liability tracks what the Court has done in other areas of federal statutory law. In those areas, the Court has not only applied proximate cause to intentional conduct (a phenomenon largely foreign to tort law from which the Court is theoretically borrowing) but has also adopted a more rigorous view of what proximate cause requires. Rather than looking only to the foreseeability of the plaintiff or the harm, which is the majority approach in the negligence arena, the Court has articulated a policy-driven perspective that allows it to restrict liability in the name of applying traditional tort doctrine. After exploring these issues, this Article argues that Staub's deployment of proximate cause in the discrimination area may have been intended to set the stage for a later effort to narrow the reach of Title VII and the other discrimination statutes by finding that "cognitive bias" does not proximately cause a resulting adverse employment action. While there is a spirited debate about whether Title VII bars adverse employment actions resulting from such bias, Staub may portend the Court's resolving that controversy by suggesting that only conscious bias can proximately cause an adverse employment action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on a public role for intentional torts in Great Britain. It provides an account of significant developments in negligence liability and cites three private law interpretations of vindication of rights. It contends that the role of intentional torts as the foundation of primary rights is useful and successful and gives the best justification for court decision.

The article focuses on the New Zealand court case Police v. K CA, which focused on the meaning of criminal intent under New Zealand law. Topics include the difference between oblique intention and indirect intention, the breadth of the definition applied to intention, and the courts' interpretation of the term.