This essay is confused where it could be clear, and clear where it should be more aware of complexity. The idea of strict liability as the primitive standard from which "modern" negligence systems diverge is ahistorical, no matter what your timescale is. For the history of the common law, it is largely but not entirely myth. In every locale, the proposition depends in part on absence of evidence about administration. Some formal source tells us that an injury of a certain type (running someone over with a horse-drawn vehicle, for example) must be paid for at a certain rate. But unless we know everything about the details of administration, we do not know at what stage of the process it may be possible for a defendant to say "But the horse was frightened by lightning and bolted," or what will happen if he does. As Toby Milsom pointed out a generation ago, the medieval English law of accident is entirely obscure to us because we have only records of pleading in Westminster Hall, not the substance of what trial evidence was like, how juries were charged, and what they decided. Beyond the blank pleading of the general issue and eventual "postea" recording an equally blank jury verdict, we can have no idea whether "unavoidable accident" was a defense, or how it fared under different factual circumstances. Not to mention the different classes of injury characteristic of human-powered and steam-powered societies....

The littlest Coasean in the house can show without breaking a sweat that the only difference between strict liability and negligence regimes is transactions costs. Hence Guido Calabresi's wonderfully original argument in _The Cost of Accidents_ (a book that people used to read when I was young, apparently under the impression that Guido's idea hadn't been had a hundred years earlier by Holmes) that the optimal tort system is strict liability appropriately imposed on the party who could avoid the accident at lowest cost. You have reinvented Guido's idea without the subtleties. But we do not live in a system without friction, and so the real point, as Coase himself (not so little as his admirers) articulated in his Nobel Prize address, is to make an exhaustive study of the transactions costs. So far as your essay's argument goes—with all the overworked nonsense about children's legs destroyed by batted balls reduced, as it should be, to the necessary minimum—strict liability is just a litigation-intensive substitute for universal health insurance, which does much more and wastes much less. Dealing with harm directly, rather than treating it as the fault of a faultless party with a nearby pocket, makes more sense.

And then, of course, the whole point of the exercise is to assume away causation, which in a strict liability system becomes the black hole. When several parties, including the plaintiff, have all contributed to an injurious outcome, all the social ready reckoning that used to be involved in determination of relative fault shifts the permanent floating crap game over to determination of causation and resumes play. Some slight experience with the confusions inherent in causation doctrine should have convinced you that all the phenomena you object to in disputes about negligence can be reformulated there, and will be once it's the only game in town.

You could then, no doubt, offer a dashingly irresponsible essay, suggesting that we impose damages liability on those who were not at fault and did not cause the harm, just because. As my distinguished colleague Victor Goldberg might say, "Find a guy who at least looks like the tort-feasor, and shoot him." This too, it turns out, is a very efficient system.