Law Commons^™

This book begins with detailed and evocative accounts of the workings of several actual personal injury cases with all their turbulence and tribulations. It then closely analyzes the (one-sided) tort reforms, both proposed and enacted, that leave too much of the present dysfunctional system intact, while even further undermining it. The authors provide a detailed account of a proposed reform: a device for encouraging defendants’ “Early Offers” of claimants’ economic losses designed to benefit both sides as well as society generally. This system, while greatly lessening the daunting uncertainty and delay plaguing personal injury claims today, would also make far …

Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Cipollone, courts have engaged in the practice of parsing the preemption language of federal legislation ostensibly to determine whether Congress intended to preclude the possibility of imposing liability on manufacturers under state products liability law. This article argues that congressional intent is largely a fiction and the cases based on it have been improperly decided. Nevertheless, the results reached in many of the cases are intuitively appealing. The reason for this is that the results commonly are based on the long-standing fairness principle that one should not be subjected to liability in …

There is widespread agreement that tort (and criminal) law developed historically as an alternative to violence. Given that pedigree, it is not surprising that preserving the peace would be pursued as a goal of punitive damages, as is claimed in several cases and law review articles. The precise relationship between peace and punitive damages is left relatively vague. However, a recent article by Professor Anthony Sebok can be used to fill in the details.

Professor Sebok constructs a private-law theory of punitive damages that emphasizes two features. First, punitive damages are awarded for violations of only a certain kind of …

Crimtorts is a word coined by Professors Thomas Koenig and Michael Rustad to describe the middle ground between criminal and tort law. Crimtorts is not a new body of law or even a new cause of action. Rather, crimtorts is an explicit recognition that criminal law principles of punishment and deterrence have been assimilated into tort law. The extent of the assimilation and its effects on the tort system are issues that merit robust consideration.

The Crimtorts symposium, held at the Widener University School of Law on February 25, 2008, took up this challenge. The participants were Professors Martha Chamallas, …