The American Law Institute periodically issues “restatements” that attempt to codify the common law—but also shift the law in the direction the institute wants it to go.

Reason enough to distrust this gang.

That’s nothing, though, compared with this:

The institute’s restatement defines the tort of battery as any contact with another person that “offends a reasonable sense of personal dignity” or—the new addition—contact that is highly offensive to another person’s “unusually sensitive sense of personal dignity, and the actor knows that the contact will be highly offensive to the other.”

Aside from the blatant assault on individual liberty this thing represents, it’s an insult to Americans everywhere: it says we’re all such special snowflakes that it’s unreasonable to expect us to suffer the bumps and bruises of human interaction without mumsy coming to the rescue. For a fee.

My sense of personal dignity is unusually sensitive to the pronouncements of the ALI—and being such highly educated and well informed persons, of course they know this.

Do I have a case? Of course not: the ALI has its own unusual sensitivity to mere plebes demurring from their pronouncements. But they’d enjoy the fee.