Tort Law And Liability Analysis

In these two chapters, Epp provides a detailed analysis of what he calls legalized accountability and its development. After noticing a shortcoming after the rights revolution in the 1960’s and 1970’s in which local bureaucracies failed to recognize the rights recognized by the Supreme Court, Epp analyzes a way in which activists took to the courts to enact social change. He argues that the expansion of tort law and liability litigation through the cases of Monroe v Pape and Monell v Department of Social Services helped create more onus on bureaucracies to protect and respect rights granted by the Supreme Court and he evaluates how these bureaucracies responded to the threat of liability litigation in the form of legalized accountability. In …show more content…
First, he states that bureaucracies are tangible manifestations of ideas on how best to run things. For example, schools are manifestations of the abstract concepts of how best to teach. These abstract ideas are connected and spread through growing networks of professionals and as such, bureaucracies tend to be insulated from outside pressure which creates a sense of orthodoxy in the organization. Due to this insulated nature, reformers try to change systems from the inside, which Epp refers to as the “traditional Progressive model” (12). This was not the only pressure facing the standard, orthodox bureaucracies that commonly violated rights and safety. They also faced pressure from outside activists who took to the …show more content…
One key factor of bureaucracies that Epp points out is that, counter-intuitive to the capitalistic society in America, organizations are not concerned about the primary effects of liability litigation such as the dollar amount they must pay for violating people’s rights. Bureaucracies are primarily concerned about about the secondary effects of public embarrassment and reputational damage. The media plays a major role role in developing this damage. Activists capitalized on the fact that the media tends to highlight “litigation stories involving graphic or salacious evidence of individual wrongdoing” (11). The problem was that the media tended to frame these stories as individualistic, not symptomatic of a larger problem. After multiple stories and patterns of rights violations, the media then started framing the narrative as a cultural problem within organizations and placed the onus on these organizations to change their