Guthrie v. Conway exemplifies the reluctance of many courts to allow victims of workplace sexual harassment to sue in tort for intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED). The employer in Guthrie escaped liability because the court did not regard numerous incidents of harassment as sufficiently “outrageous” conduct to justify tort recovery. The rewritten feminist dissent explains how courts often misuse summary judgment in hostile workplace environment cases and argues for a contextual application of the elements of IIED based on the victims’ experience. The feminist dissent would allow a jury to review the evidence in its totality, would not require the harassment to be overtly sexual to qualify as outrageous conduct, and would permit a tort claim regardless of whether the victim also had a viable claim under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The accompanying commentary catalogues the various techniques courts have used to exclude feminist perspectives in harassment cases and urges a greater role for tort litigation.

This book chapter compares civil litigation in the courts of first and second instances in Taiwan in 2010–2015 with that in U.S. federal courts in 2010–2013. The two judicial systems, as expected, are different in many ways. Settlement rates in Taiwan, even broadly defined, were below 25%; in U.S. federal court, they exceed 70%. In Taiwan, summary judgments were basically non-existent; in U.S. federal court, they represent nearly a third of merits judgments. Rates of appeal in Taiwan are nearly 10 times higher (27% versus 3%) than in the U.S. federal courts. And yet judges in Taiwan, at least those in the court of first instance, handled cases more quickly than their colleagues in the U.S. federal courts—indeed, twice as fast. Yet, the two judicial systems respond similarly when encountering simple debt collection cases. These cases, large in number in both systems, fail to settle as standard theories would predict. Instead, these disputes are frequently resolved through default judgments. This chapter provides cautionary lessons for future empirical comparative civil procedure studies.