The Director’s Cut

At the beginning of the workday, some workers do not simply arrive and start working. Workers at the Tyson Foods, Inc., plant in Storm Lake, Iowa, first must put on protective and sanitation gear that is necessary for the tasks they are performing that day. The time they spent donning and doffing that gear is at the center of a case that the Supreme Court decided on March 22.

Three of the most important purposes of tort law are: To compensate those who have been wrongly injured; To disclose the acts of wrongdoing that caused or cause harm; To deter wrongdoing in the future. Many of the exhibits at the American Museum of Tort Law reveal how powerful the second factor – disclosure –…

Flint, Mich., is under national scrutiny because of its contaminated drinking water. Various mismanagement of the city’s drinking water supply has allowed dangerous levels of lead into people’s homes, workplaces, and schools.

In his remarks at the opening of the American Museum of Tort Law, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner stated that tort law is “the weapon of the weak.”

The law is not static. It changes and evolves as society changes. So a Museum dedicated to the law is not, and cannot be static, locked in time, and frozen.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide a case involving workers at a Tyson Foods, Inc., plant who allege that the company failed to pay them overtime for donning and doffing protective and sanitation gear that they were required to wear while working, and for time spent walking to and from their workstations.