 Considered as a system of compensation, Holmes concluded, tort liability is an abject failure. In its place, Holmes proposed that the point of tort liability was two-fold: to hold people responsible for damage that they cause and to deter others from creating dangers. Each of these ideas has been important to subsequent analyses of tort law. The idea of responsibility figures in Holmes’s threefold account of degrees of culpability. It sharpens the issue of the basis of the objective standard in negligence, which holds people to a standard they may be unable to meet. Various developments of this emphasis on responsibility figure prominently in some contemporary accounts of tort liability, particularly those of Tony Honoré and those influenced by him (Honoré 1999; Perry 2001; Gardner 2001; 2018). Holmes’s emphasis on deterrence, in turn, is the source of much writing seeking to show that the law of tort is a method of regulating safety by providing incentives for people to take precautions against the risk of injury. In the second half of the last century, this aspect of Holmes’s approach shaped the development of the economic analysis of law, which has become a dominant force in legal scholarship and education in the United States.