Torts - Cases, Principles, and Institutions Fifth Edition, 2016a

Witt & Tani, TCPI 1. Introduction
Common Dispute Pyramids
Source: Galanter, supra, at 1101.
What this means is that the cases in this casebook—cases that have reached an appellate
court at the very top of the torts dispute pyramid—are virtually all atypical, and even bizarre.
Indeed, as in Vosburg, these are cases in which the disputants are jointly almost always
economically worse off than they would have been had they found some other way to resolve
their dispute. Professor Samuel Issacharoff elaborates:
[A]s soon as disputants enter the litigation process, they are clear losers. Whatever
the stakes in a dispute between two parties, there is only one way in which they can
preserve their joint welfare. Any division of the stake between them, whether it be
one side taking all, or half-and-half or anything in between, leaves the parties jointly
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