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Full-Text Articles in Law
Should Automakers Be Responsible For Accidents?, Kyle D. Logue
Should Automakers Be Responsible For Accidents?, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
Motor vehicles are among the most dangerous products sold anywhere. Automobiles pose a larger risk of accidental death than any other product, except perhaps opioids. Annual autocrash deaths in the United States have not been below 30,000 since the 1940s, reaching a recent peak of roughly 40,000 in 2016. And the social cost of auto crashes goes beyond deaths. Auto-accident victims who survive often incur extraordinary medical expenses. Those crash victims whose injuries render them unable to work experience lost income. Auto accidents also cause nontrivial amounts of property damage—mostly to the automobiles themselves, but also to highways, bridges, or …
How Liability Insurers Protect Patients And Improve Safety, Tom Baker, Charles Silver
How Liability Insurers Protect Patients And Improve Safety, Tom Baker, Charles Silver
All Faculty Scholarship
Forty years after the publication of the first systematic study of adverse medical events, there is greater access to information about adverse medical events and increasingly widespread acceptance of the view that patient safety requires more than vigilance by well-intentioned medical professionals. In this essay, we describe some of the ways that medical liability insurance organizations contributed to this transformation, and we catalog the roles that those organizations play in promoting patient safety today. Whether liability insurance in fact discourages providers from improving safety or encourages them to protect patients from avoidable harms is an empirical question that a survey …
Copyright And Tort As Mirror Models: On Not Mistaking For The Right Hand What The Left Hand Is Doing, Wendy J. Gordon
Copyright And Tort As Mirror Models: On Not Mistaking For The Right Hand What The Left Hand Is Doing, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Everything’S Bigger In Texas: Except The Medmal Settlements, Tom Baker, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick
Everything’S Bigger In Texas: Except The Medmal Settlements, Tom Baker, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick
All Faculty Scholarship
Recent work using Texas closed claim data finds that physicians are rarely required to use personal assets in medical malpractice settlements even when plaintiffs secure judgments above the physician's insurance limits. In equilibrium, this should lead physicians to purchase less insurance. Qualitative research on the behavior of plaintiffs suggests that there is a norm under which plaintiffs agree not to pursue personal assets as long as defendants are not grossly underinsured. This norm operates as a soft constraint on physicians. All other things equal, while physicians want to lower their coverage, they do not want to violate the norm and …
Review Of Corrective Justice, By E. Weinrib, Scott Hershovitz
Review Of Corrective Justice, By E. Weinrib, Scott Hershovitz
Reviews
I once heard it said of a famous philosopher of law that he never allowed his philosophy to be polluted by law. No one will ever say that about Ernie Weinrib. His latest book - Corrective Justice - is exceptional precisely because Weinrib is deeply informed about legal doctrine. Of course, he also has formidable philosophical skill, and in bringing that to bear on doctrine, he dismantles any thought that corrective justice is too abstract a concept to shed light on the practical problems that courts face. Along the way, he also demol ishes the instrumentalism that has recently dominated …
Operationalizing Deterrence Claims Management (In Hopsitals, A Large Retailer, And Jails And Prisons), Margo Schlanger
Operationalizing Deterrence Claims Management (In Hopsitals, A Large Retailer, And Jails And Prisons), Margo Schlanger
Articles
The theory that the prospect of liability for damages deters risky behavior has been developed in countless articles and books. The literature is far sparser, however, on how deterrence is operationalized. And prior work slights an equally important effect of damage actions, to incentivize claims management in addition to harm-reduction responses that are cost- rather than liabilityminimizing. This article works in the intersection of these two understudied areas, focusing on claims management steps taken by frequently sued organizations, and opening a window into the black box of deterrence to see how those steps may end up serving harm-reduction purposes as …
Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger
Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger
Articles
Potential defendants faced with the prospect of tort or tort-like damage actions can reduce their liability exposure in a number of ways. Prior scholarship has dwelled primarily on the possibility that they may respond to the threat of liability by augmenting the amount of care they take.1 Defendants (I limit myself to defendants for simplicity) will increase their expenditures on care, so the theory goes, when those expenditures yield sufficient liability-reducing dividends; more care decreases liability exposure by simultaneously making it less likely that the actors will be found to have behaved tortiously in the event of an accident and …
The (Legal) Pains Of Vioxx: Why Product Liability Can Make Products More Dangerous, Omri Ben-Shahar
The (Legal) Pains Of Vioxx: Why Product Liability Can Make Products More Dangerous, Omri Ben-Shahar
Articles
Comparing the experience of Vioxx and Celebrex leads Omri Ben-Shahar to think that stiff product liability has the perverse effect of inducing manufacturers of defective products to leave these products on the market, rather than withdraw them.
Toward A Tax-Based Explanation Of The Liability Insurance Crisis, Kyle D. Logue
Toward A Tax-Based Explanation Of The Liability Insurance Crisis, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
The so-called liability insurance crisis of 1985 and 1986 transformed the way we think about tort law and about liability insurance markets. The crisis phenomena, which first appeared in late 1984 and lasted until mid-1986, consisted of enormous increases in liability insurance premiums and alarming reductions in the availability of certain types of liability coverage. In the two principal liability lines of insurance (Other Liability and Medical Malpractice), premiums increased by hundreds (in some cases thousands) of percentage points in a matter of months. At the same time, the availability of liability insurance contracted sharply. The liability policies that were …
Of Harms And Benefits: Torts, Restitution, And Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Of Harms And Benefits: Torts, Restitution, And Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Copyright and patent take the form of ordinary property. As tangible property has physical edges, intellectual property statutes create boundaries by defining the subject matters within their zone of protection. As real property owners have rights to prevent strangers from entering their land, intellectual property statutes and case law grant owners rights to exclude strangers from using the protected work in specified ways. As tangible property can be bought and sold, bequeathed and inherited, so can copyrights and patents.