The law of torts is designed to deal with an extremely broad range of human conduct, from punches in the nose to automobile accidents; from affronts to dignity to environmental pollution; from defective products to fraud. Not only must rules of tort law regulate vastly different types of potentially harmful behavior, but they must also be flexible enough to account for the almost limitless variety of fact patterns within each type. To put it simply, no two punches in the nose are exactly alike. And yet, the rules must be fashioned in such a way as to make the law at least reasonably predictable, and the results of the cases both fair to individuals and conducive to social porsperity.