What are common law intentional torts?

What are common law intentional torts?

Michael Ehline (Attorney at Law) gives expert video advice on: What is an 'intentional tort'?; What are common law intentional torts?; What is 'battery' under English common law? and more...

Common law torts are torts that come from ancient England. You're only allowed to sue for certain torts under common law; for example, there was no statute for wrongful death. So if someone was killed in your family due to the wrongs of another, that person could be punished criminally, but there was no way to sue that person because the victim's tort was deemed to have died with the victim. But later on in the United States, the states in this country decided that it was unfair and there were also situations where we had Hatfields and McCoys going around shooting each other because you may have killed someone's uncle and now the uncle's family members were going to come after you and try to kill one of your family members. We had a lot of that going on in the early days in this country with people wearing guns and carrying shotguns everywhere with them, so a lot of the states decided to come up with a statute that would allow people to recover for wrongful death. Now under English common law we have several different types of torts that you could recover from. Conversion: if you were to convert someone's property to your own use, you could sue that person who converted that property. If someone trespassed on your land, you could go after that person for money damages, for trespass. There was also false imprisonment, where if you falsely imprisoned someone, not allowing them a reasonable means of escape, you could recover under English common law. But modernly, statutes and legislation have expanded the common law notions of negligence to include many other things, like I said, such as wrongful deaths, survival statutes, etc.