 The  economic analysis of law  treats tort law as a mechanism for regulating safety in the context of a broader focus on the efficient allocation of social resources. This approach follows Holmes in rejecting the law’s moral vocabulary as misleading. Legal economists frequently point out that we, as a society, have made a collective “Decision for Accidents” as Guido Calabresi put it in a widely discussed article (1965). We allow people to travel by car and truck even though we know statistically that this will lead to a certain number of deaths per year. We allow major infrastructure projects that will improve safety and convenience even though we know that people will be injured or killed in the course of constructing them. Similar decisions are made, implicitly or explicitly, in determining whether to permit a wide range of other activities with potential side effects on participants or non-participants. Some level of risk is unavoidable and justified, but, when activities are carried out on a large scale, some level of injury becomes inevitable; the economic problem is finding the correct level. Rather than analyzing negligence liability in terms of what the defendant did to the plaintiff, legal economists propose to understand it in terms of a more general social decision to determine the appropriate amount of safety for which we, as a society, are prepared to pay. Life could be made much safer by prohibiting a wide range of risk-imposing conduct; economic rationality demands that societies face the question of whether safety becomes too expensive at a certain point. For example, traffic accidents could be reduced dramatically by imposing speed limits of 5 mph; the cost in other goods, however, including not only convenience but such things as food spoilage and emergency services, would be too high. Economic analysis proposes to treat tort law as the solution to an optimization problem of setting the level of safety that is worth the cost of the steps taken to achieve it, and of allocating the costs of achieving such safety.