Torts and Compensation: Personal Accountability and Social Responsibility for Injury (American Casebooks) [Hardcover]

Dan B. Dobbs (Author), Paul T. Hayden (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0314150293 | ISBN-13: 978-0314150295 | Publication Date: March 2005 | Edition: Fifth Edition

This easy-to-use doctrinal favorite incorporates many cases decided within the last several years. It emphasizes personal injury torts, including civil rights torts, but also covers non-tort systems of compensation, including social security and workers' compensation. Several chapters deal with current medical malpractice and products liability law. (The malpractice chapter has a new section on nursing home liability.) Shorter chapters cover economic and dignitary torts such as defamation, privacy, fraud and others. In approach, this book attempts to present basic concepts such as duty, negligence, cause, scope of risk, and comparative responsibility by using cases and notes that ask for thoughtful analysis and synthesis, as well as respect for facts and policy. The book also investigates such current issues as tort reform and apportionment of responsibility.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dan B. Dobbs, University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law; Paul T. Hayden, Loyola Law School --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1167 pages
• Publisher: West Group Publishing; Fifth Edition edition (March 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0314150293
• ISBN-13: 978-0314150295
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #640,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Inefficient, mediocre collection of cases, November 29, 2006

By 

J. Ocampo (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Torts and Compensation: Personal Accountability and Social Responsibility for Injury (American Casebooks) (Hardcover)

As a first year law student, nobody told me about that some of the books that we are asked to read are not meant to be useful learning aids. I bought this book and did my readings faithfully and diligently for the first couple months of school. Please, do not make the same mistake that I did!

Don't use this book as your primary method to learn torts unless you enjoy wasting time and don't want a life outside of the dreary halls of your law school.

The book is incredibly inefficient. It introduces you to concepts and details of areas of tort law at a snail's pace. You'll spend 3 or 4 hours of reading and briefing cases to pick up what you could have learned in 15 minutes of reading a Casebrief, Gilbert, or Emanuel outline. The explanations between cases is mediocre, posing more questions than answers. And the book does not provide answers to the problems and hypotheticals that it asks.

As a first year law student, the professors will decieve you and tell you that you will learn more if you do all of the readings, brief the cases, and participate in the Socratic Method learning style. Big lie! In reality, volumes of scholarly pieces have been devoted to exposing the myth of the Casebook/Socratic/Langdellian method of education for the inefficient joke that it is. But your professors will ask you to be a good little law student and read your Torts and Compensation, and brief your cases.

If you make the mistake of believing them, like I did, you will find yourself studying over 50 hours a week and will only have a medicore understanding of the material.

Ignore your professors' mad rants, buy an outline book, spend 15 hours a week studying instead of 50, and have a masterful understanding of the material. Part of this strategy I outlined is ignoring this textbook. It's tailor made for the antiquated inefficiencies of the Socratic Method and all of the time wasting that goes along with it.

If your professor assigned this book to you, you probably don't have a choice and MUST buy it. If you value your time, AND want to learn torts successfully, buy a book that is keyed to this textbook and has summaries of all of the cases (in case you get called on). Look at a hornbook or a Gilbert or Emanuel outline to get a framework of Tort law. This textbook is a big waste of time. There are better, faster, more complete ways to learn torts. This book is just a detour, a weapon that first year law professors will use to make your first semester rites-of-passage as difficult as possible.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The typos kind of annoy, but the book is informative, December 30, 2002

By 

"nukemind" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Torts and Compensation: Personal Accountability and Social Responsibility for Injury (American Casebook Series) (Hardcover)

Like many students in law school I had to read this book for my Torts class. Our professor did an excellent job with a fairly mediocre book by explaining the concepts and cases at length (and thus eliminating the need for me to go and buy supplemental materials). There are sections of the book that you can gloss over (and this is precisely what our professor had us do) unless you really need to know more about tort wars or statutes of limitations etc. This book is something of a necessary evil for learning torts, but as a reference book it doesn't really cut it. If you want a more clear and concise book that you can read or peruse or use as a reference then this is not the book for you. It's strictly a textbook, but one that does the job. It could have been done better and without the typos (surely a computer spellchecker could have been used as this is the 21st century for crying out loud!). I'll be selling my book back this coming semester simply because I don't think there is anything I need from this book that I can't get elsewhere and for the record I actually enjoyed learning about torts. I would thank my excellent professor more than this book though.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Horrific editing!!!, July 31, 2001

By 

Michael W. Carew "carewlaw" (Huntington Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Torts and Compensation: Personal Accountability and Social Responsibility for Injury (American Casebook Series) (Hardcover)

I concur with my fellow reviewers that this Casebook contains more typos and grammaticla errors than a first-grader's book-report!! If your Torts prof is excellent (and mine was) such editorial problems won't keep you from getting a good grade. But, to be sure, buy the Examples and Explanations by Glannon and a good commercial outline to supplement this POOR casebook! Finally, I wholeheartedly agree with one of the reviewers who indicated that this casebook is VERY much biased towards the plaintiff's bar and against defendents, businesses, or "the MAN".