Talk:United States tort law

Question

What is the history of medical malpractice or medical negligence in U.S.A? Whether doctors are liable under tort law or contract law?how many states in U.S.A has a legislation for medical malpractice cases?

Another question

Where are all the Americans who should be editing this page! It's astonishing that nothing has been done yet (I made similar comments on the talk of the US contract law page). I know there is not one tort law for the whole country, and that states have their own regimes. But surely we can have something! Wikidea 17:36, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Just saw your question almost 15 years later. The reason is that American tort law is a gigantic mess (go read conflict of laws in the United States). Most Americans who have sufficient knowledge of American tort law to summarize it coherently are either too busy working on their next law review article or textbook, litigating cases, serving in the judiciary, or volunteering for organizations like the American Law Institute, the Uniform Law Commission, or a bar association (local, state, national) to contribute to Wikipedia. Or they're working on an actual book, like The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Torts, which is an excellent summary of the subject. With so much great published material already out there, anyone with that level of knowledge and experience either doesn't feel like it's worth it to reinvent the wheel on Wikipedia, or they would rather write their own book and get it published.

Keep in mind it took me over five years just to get around to researching and rewriting product liability and another three years to actually do it (and that's only because I know the subject very well). So there's no way I'm ever going to get around to rewriting this article when there are many more specific articles that I am more interested in working on. --Coolcaesar (talk) 14:49, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

This article is a train wreck

Below is a proposal I posted to Talk:United States labor law last December. I propose to do the same here.

After further thought, I propose to start by dumping the massive laundry lists which User:Wikidea has been very fond of inserting into Wikipedia articles like this one. Those lists are entirely inappropriate under WP:NOT: namely, "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" and "data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources." Those lists are utterly useless because they fail to summarize the holdings of the cases cited and thus fail to explain the importance of those cases or put them in their proper context. The only way to ascertain the relevance of each case is to click through the links and read every single article (or the underlying case where no article has been written) and no one has the time to do that.

The correct approach to summarizing the law on Wikipedia (or in any other coherent legal discussion) is to discuss the law as a system of rules (focusing on the overall structure first and the underlying authority second) and to try to cite third-party commentary where available, with occasional direct citations to and quotes from the most important cases. Unfortunately, that did not happen here. Too many citations are directly to cases.

Any objections before I try to clean up this mess? Coolcaesar (talk) 01:57, 8 August 2025 (UTC)