Definition
Torts is the body of civil law governing wrongful acts — whether intentional, negligent, or based on strict liability — that cause harm to another person, their property, or their legally protected interests, and for which the injured party may seek a civil remedy, most commonly damages. The term functions both as a field of law (tort law) and, in older usage, as the plural of "tort," referring collectively to individual wrongful acts giving rise to civil liability.
A tort is distinguished from a crime (though the same act may be both) and from a breach of contract (which arises from a voluntary agreement rather than a general duty imposed by law). The law of torts defines the duties persons owe one another as members of society, independent of any contract between them.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Synonym of tort law — the area of law dealing with wrongful acts, whether intentional or negligent, regarded as non-criminal and unrelated to contracts, which cause injuries and can be remedied in civil courts, usually through the awarding of damages.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; the word derives from the French and Latin for "wrong" or "twisted," and in general English use carried the broad sense of a wrongful or injurious act.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is primarily one of precision and scope. Casual usage treats "torts" as essentially synonymous with "lawsuits" or "injuries." Legal usage is more bounded: not every injury gives rise to a tort, and not every tort produces compensable damages. The doctrinal structure — duty, breach, causation, harm — is invisible in common usage and essential in legal analysis.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Intentional torts: Wrongful acts committed with intent to cause the result, or with substantial certainty that the result will follow. Examples include battery, assault, false imprisonment, trespass, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Negligence: The dominant category in modern tort law. Liability arises when a defendant fails to exercise the care a reasonable person would exercise under the circumstances, and that failure causes cognizable harm.
Strict liability torts: Liability imposed without regard to intent or reasonable care, typically in cases involving abnormally dangerous activities, defective products, or certain animals.
Nuisance: Interference with the use and enjoyment of land (private nuisance) or with rights common to the public (public nuisance). Often analyzed separately from the core negligence framework.
Why It Matters in Research
Torts is one of the most internally varied fields in private law, and the label can mislead researchers who assume coherence across its subcategories. Negligence doctrine developed largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; intentional torts have common law roots going back centuries; products liability as a strict liability theory is largely a post-1960s development. A source that describes "the law of torts" may be describing only one of these tracks.
The distinction between tort and contract is a persistent research trap. Historically, the line was blurry — many claims now classified as negligence were once framed in assumpsit or other contractual forms. In professional liability cases (legal malpractice, medical malpractice), courts still wrestle with whether a duty sounds in tort, contract, or both. Do not assume a modern tort classification maps cleanly onto historical pleading categories.
Conflict of laws is a significant complication in historical sources. Bouvier's entry addresses torts specifically in the context of choice of law — which jurisdiction's law governs an act committed in one place and litigated in another. The "double actionability" rule (the act must be tortious in both the place of commission and the forum) was the dominant common law approach for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is reflected in the Bouvier excerpt. Modern conflict-of-laws analysis for torts has largely moved away from this rule, so historical sources on "foreign torts" require careful contextual reading.
Researchers using nineteenth-century sources should note that the concept of negligence as a general, freestanding tort was not fully consolidated until the late 1800s. Earlier materials may treat negligence as an element of other claims rather than as an independent cause of action. The rise of the duty concept — particularly following the influence of cases establishing that a duty of care could run to strangers — is a doctrinal development that post-dates most of the classic treatise literature available in historical law libraries.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, the encyclopedia entries on Negligence, Civil Liability, and Strict Liability will supply the structural frameworks that dictionary sources treat only in passing. Bouvier addresses torts primarily through the lens of procedure and conflict of laws rather than substantive doctrine — a characteristic limitation of nineteenth-century legal dictionary treatment of this field.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment of torts is notably sparse on substantive doctrine and focused almost entirely on conflict-of-laws questions: which jurisdiction's law applies, and when a foreign tort will support a domestic action. The excerpt reflects the double actionability rule — damages are measured by the law of the place of the act, and an action will lie in the forum only when the act is tortious under both systems. This was standard doctrine in 1800s American and English law.
What Bouvier does not address — and what researchers should not expect from this source — is any systematic account of negligence, the elements of specific intentional torts, or the relationship between tort and criminal liability. Nineteenth-century legal dictionaries generally treated torts as a procedural and jurisdictional matter rather than as a substantive body of rules. The great synthesizing treatises on tort law (Pollock, Cooley, Prosser in the twentieth century) developed well after Bouvier's primary editions and represent a separate intellectual tradition.
The absence of a developed negligence doctrine in Bouvier is historically accurate, not a gap in his coverage — the field had not yet consolidated into the form researchers encounter in modern materials.
Jurisdictional Note
Tort law in the United States is primarily state law, and significant variations exist across jurisdictions in areas including comparative fault rules, damage caps, strict products liability standards, and the scope of duty in negligence. Federal courts apply state tort law in diversity cases under Erie principles. Researchers should not assume that a rule described in a general treatise or encyclopedia reflects the law of any particular state.