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Full-Text Articles in Law
Deterring And Compensating Oil-Spill Catastrophes: The Need For Strict And Two-Tier Liability, W. Kip Viscusi
Deterring And Compensating Oil-Spill Catastrophes: The Need For Strict And Two-Tier Liability, W. Kip Viscusi
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted the glaring weaknesses in the current liability and regulatory regime for oil spills and for environmental catastrophes more broadly. This Article proposes a new liability structure for deep-sea oil drilling and for catastrophic risks generally. It delineates a two-tier system of liability. The first tier would impose strict liability up to the firm's financial resources, including insurance coverage. The second tier would be an annual tax equal to the expected costs in the coming year beyond this damages amount. Before beginning a risky operation, the proposed liability scheme would identify a single firm-the …
Deterring And Compensating Oil-Spill Catastrophes: The Need For Strict And Two-Tier Liability, W. Kip Viscusi, Richard J. Zeckhauser
Deterring And Compensating Oil-Spill Catastrophes: The Need For Strict And Two-Tier Liability, W. Kip Viscusi, Richard J. Zeckhauser
Vanderbilt Law Review
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted the glaring weaknesses in the current liability and regulatory regime for oil spills and for environmental catastrophes more broadly. This Article proposes a new liability structure for deep-sea oil drilling and for catastrophic risks generally. It delineates a two-tier system of liability. The first tier would impose strict liability up to the firm's financial resources, including insurance coverage. The second tier would be an annual tax equal to the expected costs in the coming year beyond this damages amount. Before beginning a risky operation, the proposed liability scheme would identify a single firm-the …
Deepwater Drilling: Law, Policy, And Economics Of Firm Organization And Safety, Mark A. Cohen, Madeline Gottlieb, Joshua Linn, Nathan Richardson
Deepwater Drilling: Law, Policy, And Economics Of Firm Organization And Safety, Mark A. Cohen, Madeline Gottlieb, Joshua Linn, Nathan Richardson
Vanderbilt Law Review
Although the causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill are not yet conclusively identified, significant attention has focused on the safety-related policies and practices-often referred to as the safety culture-of BP and other firms involved in drilling the well. This Article defines and characterizes the economic and policy forces that affect safety culture and identifies reasons why those forces may or may not be adequate or effective from the public's perspective. Two potential justifications for policy intervention are that: (1) not all of the social costs of a spill may be internalized by a firm; and (2) there may be principal-agent …
Splitting The Baby: Standardizing Issue Class Certification, Jenna G. Farleigh
Splitting The Baby: Standardizing Issue Class Certification, Jenna G. Farleigh
Vanderbilt Law Review
The Bible depicts King Solomon resolving a dispute between two women who claimed to be the mother of the same child. In the pursuit of justice, King Solomon threatened to do the unthinkable- slice the child in two. Although severing children is not a recommended vehicle for justice, severing lawsuits is. In fact, in the class-action context, the "issue class" established by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(c)(4) does just what King Solomon threatened-it severs litigation into pieces, allowing aggregate treatment of only certain issues in a given lawsuit. Residual issues are left to be determined in plaintiff-specific, follow-on suits. …
Causing Infringement, Mark Bartholomew, Patrick F. Mcardle
Causing Infringement, Mark Bartholomew, Patrick F. Mcardle
Vanderbilt Law Review
In its most recent contributory infringement pronouncement, the Supreme Court advised courts wrestling with these issues to consult tort law's own contributory liability framework, which it described as "well established."31 The conventional wisdom among legal scholars agrees with the Court. Most scholarship in this area contends that obeisance to traditional tort law principles of contributory liability will fill the void in infringement law with answers that are adequately calibrated to the balance between incentivizing creation and permitting downstream use. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom. Although we agree that tort law can shed some much-needed light on contributory infringement, we …