This month our Internet links focus on tort law, which covers many areas, because of the different types of tort actions. The three main tort types are negligent torts, intentional torts, and torts based on strict liability. As these can then fall into the insurance area, medical malpractice or product liability, among other subjects, finding good web sites that link to all these areas of the law is difficult.

The American Bar Association’s Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section, commonly referred to as "TIPS," is one site where attorneys such as plaintiffs' attorneys, defense attorneys and insurance and corporate counsel address issues of common concern. This site contains many good resources, articles, links and more.   For instance, if you choose the Section Periodicals on the left hand side of the page, both The Brief and the Tort Trial and Insurance Law Journal allow you to look at an index of past issues by subject, author and title. http://www.abanet.org/tips/home.html You can find past articles on Bad Faith or Medical Malpractice quite easily. In addition, the site includes the good eDicta portal site for Insurance law issues. I have written about this site previously, but you should not forget that it is linked here. http://www.edicta.org/TIPSPORTAL.htm

While I am normally not a fan of Hieros Gamos, the tort section of the site is actually quite useful. You can find it here: http://www.hg.org/torts.html. It includes a list of Internet and non-Internet based articles that address the various issues of tort law, plus links to associations involved in tort law. It also includes links to recent tort cases and federal laws and regulatory agencies.

As always, visit Cornell’s Legal Information Institute and look at their subject guide to Tort law. http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/torts.html While visiting the site don’t forget to look at their guide to Product Liability http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/products_liability.html
and the guide to Insurance law http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/insurance.html.

Thomson Publishing’s Findlaw web site still contains some excellent subject guides. You can find the list of subjects at this location: http://library.lp.findlaw.com/subject.html. It has one on Products Liability plus one on Torts and Personal Injury. If you select Torts/Personal Injury you can then select a subcategory such as Motor Vehicles or Consumer Fraud, which will link you to articles on these subjects. The articles in many cases are at least a few years old, but can be of some use. The articles are general in scope and of more use to the public than the practicing attorney, but still worth a look. In addition, Findlaw hosts a number of legal news links and one of them is for Tort Law news. You can find it at: http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/us/tort/.

You should check one more interesting source. While not a site specifically for tort law, the Google search engine now includes a beta version of a search called Google Scholar. This portion of the search engine is “specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.” It is at the following location: http://scholar.google.com/. Use the Advanced Scholar Search function and look for your issue where my words occur in the title of the article. It can lead you to some interesting results.

If you need more information, or help in finding resources, contact the King County Law Library at 206-296-0940, or go to our web site at www.kcll.org and choose “Not Finding What You’re Looking For? to send us a question via email or chat.