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Full-Text Articles in Law
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
All Faculty Scholarship
This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of the current design of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts’ reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, the recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.
Slides: The Roadless Rules And The Roles Of States And Communities, Sharon Friedman
Slides: The Roadless Rules And The Roles Of States And Communities, Sharon Friedman
The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)
Presenter: Sharon Friedman, Director of Planning, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region
13 slides
Product Liability, Research And Development, And Innovation, W. Kip Viscusi, Michael J. Moore
Product Liability, Research And Development, And Innovation, W. Kip Viscusi, Michael J. Moore
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Product liability ideally should promote efficient levels of product safety, but misdirected liability efforts may depress beneficial innovations. This paper examines these competing effects of liability costs on product R & D intensity and new product introductions by manufacturing firms. At low to moderate levels of expected liability costs, there is a positive effect of liability costs on product innovation. At very high levels of liability costs, the effect is negative. At the sample mean, liability costs increase R & D intensity by 15 percent. The greater linkage of these effects to product R & D rather than process R …