There are, of course, other goals that tort law might advance. They include:

1. Compensate parties for all of the harms they suffer, whether efficient or inefficient.
2. Provide social insurance to all persons who suffer an injury. (After all, my neighbor suffers the same damage to his house whether the spark-catching device costs $80 or $110.)
3. Punish people for behaving immorally.

The refusal of many economic analysts to attend to the third of these objectives is controversial. That controversy is considered in some depth in the essay on the critique of economic analysis.

The second idea -- that tort law should provide people insurance against accident -- initially seems attractive. However, tort law is a very expensive way of providing such insurance. The costs of taking a case to trial are much higher both to the parties and to the court than the cost of purchasing either first-party or third-party liability insurance. The market can provide insurance at a much lower price than can be provided through the legal system. Thus, because the market is more efficient at supplying insurance than the legal system, most economists believe that the law of tort should be restricted to deterring inefficient harms.