Definition
The use of explosives to break apart rock, earth, or other solid material for construction, demolition, mining, or excavation purposes. In tort law, blasting is the paradigmatic example of an abnormally dangerous activity — one that courts have used for over a century to define and test the boundaries of strict liability. A party engaged in blasting may be held liable for resulting damage to persons or property regardless of whether they exercised reasonable care in conducting the operation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle and gerund of "blast" — the act of exploding or destroying something with an explosive charge.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act or process of one who, or that which, blasts; the business of one who blasts." Webster's also captures the agricultural sense of blight or crop destruction by pernicious cause.
The common meaning tracks the legal meaning closely in its core sense, but the gap matters: in ordinary usage, blasting is a neutral description of a physical process. In law, blasting carries a distinct doctrinal freight — it is not merely a description of conduct but a category of activity that triggers strict liability analysis. The question for a legal researcher is never simply whether blasting occurred, but under which liability framework that blasting will be judged.
Common Confusion
The central doctrinal confusion surrounding blasting is the negligence versus strict liability distinction. Bouvier's entry reflects a negligence standard — "not liable... unless he is negligent" — while Anderson's points toward a rule of absolute liability for proximately caused harm regardless of care exercised. These are not reconcilable positions; they reflect the genuine historical tension in the case law as courts moved from negligence-based analysis toward strict liability for ultrahazardous activities. Researchers encountering older materials must identify which framework the jurisdiction and era applied before drawing conclusions about liability exposure. Do not assume that "due care" is a complete defense — in many jurisdictions, it is not.
Why It Matters in Research
Blasting is the cornerstone case study for ultrahazardous or abnormally dangerous activity doctrine, which means research on this term frequently spans multiple doctrinal frameworks simultaneously: negligence, nuisance, trespass, and strict liability. The liability standard is the first variable to pin down, and it shifted substantially across the twentieth century.
Historical sources are unreliable on this point. Bouvier's formulation — reflecting New York authority from the 1890s — applies a negligence standard that most modern jurisdictions have since abandoned for strict liability. Anderson's cross-reference to nuisance reflects a separate line of analysis that coexisted with negligence doctrine. Researchers using historical dictionaries to characterize the law of blasting will find genuine doctrinal disagreement, not settled authority.
In the Law Mind corpus, blasting doctrine connects directly to Restatement analysis. The Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 519–520 identified blasting as a canonical example of abnormally dangerous activity, and the Restatement (Third) of Torts revised the framework while reaching similar results. The trajectory from Bouvier's negligence-inflected authority to modern strict liability is traceable through the corpus and illuminates the broader evolution of enterprise liability theory.
Jurisdictional variation in the historical record is significant. Some courts clung to negligence analysis well into the twentieth century, particularly for cases involving concussive force (air vibration, ground shock) as opposed to flyrock or direct debris. The Bouvier's excerpt reflects exactly this distinction — injury from "pulsations of the air and vibration of the earth" being treated differently from direct physical impact. This distinction has largely collapsed under modern strict liability but survives in some older authority.
Corpus researchers should also watch for blasting appearing in nuisance analysis (Anderson's cross-reference), in eminent domain contexts where government contractors claim sovereign immunity, and in insurance coverage disputes where policy language may distinguish between "explosion" and blasting as a scheduled operation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's and Anderson's agree that blasting raises liability questions but diverge sharply on the governing standard. Bouvier's tracks a negligence rule drawn from New York case law and adds the qualification that even negligence-free blasting may implicate liability depending on the force of the charge used — an early signal of strict liability reasoning embedded within a negligence framework. Anderson's moves closer to absolute liability, stating that if a voluntary lawful act naturally results in injury, the actor pays for all proximate consequences regardless of care. Neither source fully anticipates the strict liability synthesis that the Restatements would later formalize.
What both historical sources miss: the modern doctrinal apparatus distinguishing between the activity itself (ultrahazardous or abnormally dangerous) and the reasonable care inquiry that strict liability is designed to bypass. Historical dictionaries treat blasting as a problem of proof and causation; modern doctrine treats it as a problem of risk allocation and activity-level deterrence. That shift in framing is not visible in either Bouvier's or Anderson's and must be supplied from the broader corpus.
Jurisdictional Note
Most American jurisdictions now apply strict liability to blasting under either the ultrahazardous activity doctrine or the Restatement framework, making negligence analysis largely irrelevant to liability (though relevant to damages and comparative fault calculations). A minority of jurisdictions retain negligence-based analysis for certain types of concussive or vibrational damage. English and Commonwealth law developed a parallel but distinct strict liability framework under Rylands v. Fletcher, which may appear in comparative sources within the corpus.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia — Strict Liability and Abnormally Dangerous Activities: Blasting and Explosives (torts_138)