Law Commons^™

Products Liability: Principles Of Justice For The 21st Century, David G. Owen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Risk Assessment Evidence To Prove Increased Risk And Alternative Causation In Toxic Tort Litigation, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Due to the difficulties of proving causation in most toxic tort suits, plaintiffs and defendants in toxic tort litigation have begun to develop and use scientifically sophisticated risk assessments as evidence in proving or disproving causation. This use has led to two new trends in tort liability. First, there is the trend in which risk assessment is used by plaintiffs to buttress claims for future injury or increased risk. Second, there is the trend in which risk assessment is used by defendants to establish that other factors caused, in whole or in part, plaintiffs’ injuries.

This article evaluates these two …

Process Norms In Products Litigation: Liability For Allergic Reactions, James A. Henderson Jr.

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

State Choice Of Law In Mass Tort Cases: A Response To 'A View From The Legislature, Aaron Twerski, R. A. Sedler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Note, Hedonic Damages For Wrongful Death: Are Tortfeasors Getting Away With Murder?, Erin O'Hara O'Connor

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Doctrinal Collapse In Products Liability: The Empty Shell Of Failure To Warn, Aaron Twerski, J. A. Henderson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Doctrinal Collapse In Products Liability: The Empty Shell Of Failure To Warn, James A. Henderson Jr., Aaron Twerski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Liability for a manufacturer's failure to warn of product-related risks is a well-established feature of modern products liability law. Yet many serious doctrinal and conceptual problems underlie these claims. Professors Henderson and Twerski explore these problems and argue that failure-to-warn jurisprudence is confused, perhaps irreparably, and that this confusion often results in the imposition of excessive liability on manufacturers. The authors begin by exposing basic errors resulting from courts' confusion over whether to apply a strict liability or a negligence standard of care in failure-to-warn cases. Having determined that negligence is the appropriate standard, they then examine more substantial and …

The Quiet Revolution In Products Liability: An Empirical Study Of Legal Change, James A. Henderson Jr., Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Most revolutions are noisy, tumultuous affairs. This is as true of significant shifts in legal doctrine as it is of shifts of political power through force of arms. The pro-plaintiff revolution in products liability in the early 1960s will forever be associated with heroic, martial images, epitomized in Prosser's description of the assault upon, and fall of, the fortressed citadel of privity. In contrast to these noisy, exuberant events, the revolution to which we refer has gone all but unnoticed. In fact, some followers of the products liability wars will find our hypothesis so contrary to currently shared wisdom as …

This Gun For Hire: Dancing In The Dark Of The First Amendment, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

Classified advertisements in newspapers and magazines represent a uniquely democratic access to the media for the individual. Without having to pay the thousands of dollars for full-page advertisements, buyers and sellers can purchase space for their offers for only a few dollars, yet have them seen by city-wide or nation-wide audiences. Democracy, though, breeds its own excesses, and the legal question is always how to control that excess without harming the freedom.

As befits a medium open to all, classified advertisements run the gamut of human activity, from the sale of a used automobile to employment to lonely singles looking …

Drug Testing Of Student Athletes: Some Contract And Tort Implications, Leroy Pernell

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.

Liability Of Computer Bulletin Board Operators For Defamation Posted By Others, Loftus Becker

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Attitudes Toward Corporate Responsibility: A Psycholegal Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most striking phenomena in the contemporary legal world is the shift toward holding businesses and corporations responsible for harm. Legal theorists and historians maintain that today business corporations are expected to provide compensation for injuries that in earlier times would have been attributed to individuals or to fate. Furthermore, criminal charges against businesses and business executives are becoming commonplace.

Despite a good deal of legal scholarship on the shift toward holding businesses culpable for harms, psychologists have conducted little systematic research on public views of corporate responsibility. How do people conceptualize the civil liability or criminal responsibility …

Compensation For Smoking-Related Injuries: An Alternative To Strict Liability In Tort, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Surgeon General has described cigarette smoking as the "single most important preventable environmental factor contributing to illness, disability and death in the United States." Each year, smoking-related diseases claim more than 350,000 lives. Smoking-related illnesses also impose a huge economic burden on society. Estimates of health care costs range from $12 billion to $22 billion per year, and productivity losses due to illness and death are even greater.

Arguably, cigarette companies and their customers ought to bear the health costs of smoking. At the present time, however, the tobacco industry has largely escaped responsibility for these costs. Instead, smoking-related …

Torts, Ralph Michael Stein

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article surveys the most significant torts cases decided in the courts of New York State during the Survey year. Only cases which challenged existing law, modified longstanding doctrine, or announced new decisional law have been included. While 1989 was not a year of signal change for the law of torts, a number of cases deserve examination and analysis.

Disappearances And The Inter-American Court: Reflections On A Litigation Experience, Juan E. Mendez

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Can It Really Be Unconstitutional To Regulate Product Safety Information?, David S. Cohen

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this paper, I examine the impact of two Supreme Court decisions on information-based product safety regulation which, in a variety of guises in Canada, can be said to restrict manufacturers', distributors' and marketers' ability to "express" themselves. In the end, I conclude that, if one appreciates the justification for and the processes by which this kind of product safety regulation is instituted, there is only a small risk that the current regulatory activity will be held unconstitutional. When one takes into account the degree of co-operation between business and government in establishing the content of most regulatory activity and …

Unavoidably Unsafe Products And Strict Products Liability: What Liability Rule Should Be Applied To The Sellers Of Pharmaceutical Products?, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Injuries from adverse drug reactions have increased dramatically in recent years. This increase is largely attributable to the changing nature of pharmaceutical products. First of all, more pharmaceutical products are currently available to physicians than ever in history. Presently, there are more than ten thousand prescription drugs on the market, and each year four hundred to five hundred new ones are introduced. Second, modern drugs often are more potent than their older counterparts, thus increasing the likelihood of adverse reactions.

It should come as no surprise that this rise in the number of drug-related injuries has led to a comparable …

Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A century ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., examined the history of negligence in search of a general theory of tort. He concluded that from the earliest times in England, the basis of tort liability was fault, or the failure to exercise due care. Liability for an injury to another arose whenever the defendant failed "to use such care as a prudent man would use under the circumstances.” A decade ago Morton J. Horwitz reexamined the history of negligence for the same purpose and concluded that negligence was not originally understood as carelessness or fault. Rather, negligence meant "neglect or failure …

Invasion Of Privacy: Some Communicative Torts Whose Time Has Gone, Harvey L. Zuckman

Scholarly Articles

Because invasion of privacy developed from a late nineteenth century law review article motivated in large part by personal animus against the "yellow" press of the era rather than through traditional incremental common-law decision making, and because it has no central trunk but rather four disparate branches whose supposedly protected interests are subject to debate,' this complex of torts presents numerous operational problems for our judicial system. Constitutional problems are created as well by the generation of tension if not direct conflict with first amendment interests when civil liability is imposed for certain kinds of communication. And if all this …

The American Torts Of Invasion Of Privacy: Substantial Corruption Of English Common Law, Harvey L. Zuckman

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Legislative Reforms Of Governmental Tort Liability: Overreacting To Minimal Evidence, Ann Judith Gellis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The First-Party Insurance Externality: An Economic Justification For Enterprise Liability, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

This Article explores the insurance and deterrence implications of important and long overlooked facts. Consumers are insured through first-party mechanisms against most of the risks of product accidents. However, first-party insurers rarely and imperfectly adjust premiums according to an individual consumer's decisions concerning exactly what products she will purchase, how many of those products she will purchase, and how carefully she will consume them. Such consumer decisions we refer to as "consumption choices. " This failure by first-party insurers to adjust premiums according to consumption choices gives rise to a first-party insurance externality. Based on this insight, this Article offers …

Book Review: Deforming Tort Reform, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The storms buffeting the tort system over the past two decades have come in three distinct waves. In the late 1960s, steep increases in the insurance costs incurred by health care providers protecting against negligence claims by patients triggered what came to be known as the "medical malpractice crisis." In the mid-1970s, manufacturers whose liability insurance premiums suddenly soared raised obstreperous complaints that called public attention to the existence of a "product liability crisis." Finally, other groups whose activities created risks exposing them to lawsuits found that their liability insurance rates had also risen precipitously. A full-blown "torts crisis" was …

Automobile Accident Litigation In Kentucky, Office Of Continuing Legal Education At The University Of Kentucky College Of Law, Robert D. Monfort

Continuing Legal Education Materials

A practitioner's handbook that walks attorneys through the litigation processes arising from automobile accidents and related issues.