In December 1878, Thomas Cooley put the finishing touches on A Treatise on the Law of Torts or the Wrongs Which Arise Independent of Contract. He described the purpose and intended audience in the Preface:

In preparing the following pages the purpose has been to set forth with reasonable clearness the general principles under which tangible and intangible rights may be claimed, and their disturbance remedied in the law. The book has been written quite as much for students as for practitioners, and if some portions of it are more elementary than is usual in similar works, this tact will supply the explanation.

Given his purpose and his audience, there is much one can learn about the development of American tort law by comparing and contrasting Cooley’s outlook with what one might encounter today from a similar source. The comparison will reveal some things that are said differently now and some things that are not said at all now. Here’s something that might fit in either category:

Much is said by some writers concerning natural rights and natural liberty. and of the duty of the government, instead of creating, to recognize those which come from nature. As if nature had indicated any clear line which the humble intellect and conscience would infallibly recognize, on either side of which might be placed the acts permitted and the acts prohibited, according as the one or the other was by nature justified or condemned. As if every human act or omission had a moral quality of which the government could take notice, and by which it might judge the act or omission. Indeed, some have even gone so far as to assume that in a world where the moral law was accepted fully and obeyed implicitly, no law would be necessary, because every individual would at once perceive and do that which was right, and thus put legal compulsion out of the question. But if the most conscientious persons in any state of existence were compelled to support themselves by their industry; if they had occasion to buy and sell, and to find their transactions affected by accident and mistake; if occasionally they encountered questions of defective title, or questions of commercial law, where one of two innocent persons must inevitably suffer; if bankruptcies must occur, the consequences of which must fall upon third persons, whose dealings with the bankrupt had been interwoven with dealings between themselves; in short, if they lived in a world which, except in the moral qualities of the people, corresponded to the present, they would be likely soon to discover that the rule of morality is very far from being adequate to the adjustment of a large proportion of all the controversies in which conscientious men, in the absence of law, would find themselves involved.