The Floodgates of Strict Liability: Bursting Reservoirs and the Adoption of Fletcher v. Rylands in the Gilded Age

Abstract

In the standard historical interpretation of American tort law, the era of laissez-faire and pro-industry fault liability dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,' and the mid-twentieth century marked the gradual rise of strict liability.2 Scholars and judges presenting this narrative have focused on the reception of Fletcher v. Rylands, an English case from the 1860s in which a reservoir used for supplying water power to a textile mill burst into a neighbor's underground mine shafts.In one of the most significant and controversial precedents in the strict liability canon, 4 the 1.

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