 Holmes’s efforts to treat tort law as a unified subject and to analyze that unity in terms of its social and economic effects shaped doctrinal scholarship in the United States of America in the middle part of the twentieth century. Skeptical of the ways in which legal doctrine presents itself, scholars sought to analyze tort law in terms of how it functions to brings about certain social and economic effects. The rise of functionalism in tort theory interacted with the rise of legal realism with its more general skepticism about the ability of legal rules to generate determinate results and its related emphasis on the ways in which judges sought to achieve particular political and economic purposes through legal decisions. This approach was captured in the title of a prominent article, “Tort Law: Public Law in Disguise” (Green 1959). Some realist-inspired writers suggested that the function of tort law was to achieve both deterrence and compensation; others emphasized one or the other of these goals (Prosser 1941).