Law Commons^™

Causation In Disgorgement, Mark P. Gergen

Mark P. Gergen

The Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment offers scant guidance on how to determine wealth legally attributable to a wrong for purposes of disgorgement. The black letter admits defeat, stating, "[T]he court may apply such tests of causation and remoteness, . . . may recognize such credits or deductions, and may assign such evidentiary burdens, as reason and fairness dictate, consistent with the object of restitution . . . ."' The comments warn against resort to mechanical rules, including the familiar rule of but-for causation. They recommend merging the factual issue of causation with issues of policy and fairness …

Remedies: A Guide For The Perplexed, Doug Rendleman

Doug Rendleman

Remedies is one of a law student’s most practical courses. Remedies students and their professors learn to work with their eyes on the question at the end of litigation: what can the court do for the successful plaintiff? Remedies develops students’ professional identities and broadens their professional horizons by reorganizing their analysis of procedure, torts, contracts, and property around choosing and measuring relief - compensatory damages, punitive damages, an injunction, specific performance, disgorgement, and restitution. This article discusses the law-school course in Remedies - the content of the Remedies course, the Remedies classroom experience, and Remedies outside the classroom through …

What Types Of Losses Are Recoverable Under Arkansas' Products Liability Law, Rodney A. Smolla

Rod Smolla

Not available.

A Paradigm For Sexual Harassment: Toward The Optimal Level Of Loss, Marie T. Reilly

Marie T. Reilly

This article proposes a paradigm that draws from the common-law rule of negligence. It defines actionable sexual conduct in the workplace in terms of the cost of precautionary conduct and the increased safety such precaution would have yielded. Like the rule of negligence, the proposed paradigm creates incentives for men and women to take steps to prevent sexual conduct loss to the point at which the cost of an additional increment of precaution is equal to the value of the reduction in risk of loss. This point is the optimal level of precaution. After this point, additional precaution might further …

Making Sense Of Successor Liability, Marie T. Reilly

Marie T. Reilly

A firm that buys assets from another firm ordinarily does not acquire liability to the seller's creditors simply by buying its assets. This ordinary rule is subject to important exceptions. The buyer's consent triggers an exception. If a buyer agrees to assume the seller's liability to third parties, it is for that reason liable. This article considers a more controversial exception - successor liability. When a court decides that an asset acquirer should be treated as a "successor" to the transferor, it is liable for the transferor's debts as though it were the transferor.

Allowing Patients To Waive The Right To Sue For Medical Malpractice: A Response To Thaler And Sunstein, Tom Baker, Timothy D. Lytton

Timothy D. Lytton

This essay critically evaluates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s proposal to allow patients to prospectively waive their rights to bring a malpractice claim, presented in their recent, much acclaimed book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. We show that the behavioral insights that undergird Nudge do not support the waiver proposal. In addition, we demonstrate that Thaler and Sunstein have not provided a persuasive cost-benefit justification for the proposal. Finally, we argue that their liberty-based defense of waivers rests on misleading analogies and polemical rhetoric that ignore the liberty and other interests served by patients’ tort law rights. …

Responsibility For Human Suffering: Awareness Participation And The Frontiers Of Tort Law , Timothy D. Lytton

Timothy D. Lytton

No abstract provided.

Vicarious Liability And Non-Delegable Duty In Common Law Actions Based On Institutional Child Abuse, Neil J. Foster

Neil J Foster

The paper discusses the options for holding institutions civilly liable for child sexual abuse. In particular it suggests that the law of non-delegable duty ought to be extended to intentional torts like battery.

Women Made Whole: How Tort Law Can Change The Lives Of Domestic Violence And Sexual Assault Victims, Sara L. Crewson

Sara L Crewson

Tort law and insurance companies are failing to provide female domestic violence victims with adequate access to civil courts, proper legal mechanisms with which to gain that access, and are far behind the times when compared to other gender-linked crimes like those of rape and sexual assault. The Restatement of Torts (Third) has classified domestic violence as an intentional tort, and most insurance policies will not provide coverage for harms that were committed intentionally. Certain homeowners' insurance policies won't provide coverage if a spouse tries to sue another spouse for harms committed, leaving vulnerable wives unable to seek compensation for …

Universal Health Care And The Continued Reliance On Custom In Determining Medical Malpractice , James A. Henderson Jr., John A. Siliciano

John A. Siliciano

No abstract provided.

Variability In Punitive Damages: Empirically Assessing Exxon Shipping Co. V. Baker, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise, Martin T. Wells

Michael Heise

Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker acknowledged that empirical studies undercut criticism of punitive damages. Paradoxically, the Court simultaneously expressed concern about jury predictability based on a high and variable punitive–compensatory ratio published in an article by the present authors. The Court reduced the $2.5 billion Exxon Valdez punitive award to $500 million and stated: “the constitutional outer limit may well be 1:1.” Our empirical findings do not support the unpredictability concern or widely applying the limiting ratio. The high and variable ratio is an artifact of not accounting for the key variable that explains punitive awards – the compensatory award.

Trends In The Efficacy Of Parental Alienation Allegations In Child Custody Cases And Their Implications For Tortious Action, Bruce L. Beverly

Bruce L. Beverly

As the second of a series, this paper attempts to further explore the phenomenon of parental alienation in domestic relations cases by exploring the often frustrating position that many courts take with regard to blatant and obvious violations of the fundamental rights of parents to raise and know their children. Ofttimes, where courts have found the most blatant interference and harmful manipulation by one parent of the other parent's formerly close relationship with a child, the court either forces a detrimentally aligned child into the custody of the wrongfully vilified parent, thereby harming possible the child and that injured parent, …

Is An Apartment A Nuisance?, Michael Lewyn

Michael E Lewyn

In an ongoing Texas lawsuit, some homeowners allege that a nearby apartment building will constitute a nuisance. This article asserts that courts should generally reject nuisance claims against multifamily housing, based on the public interest in favor of increased housing supply and infill development.

Tort As Democracy: Lessons From The Food Wars, Melissa D. Mortazavi

Melissa Mortazavi

The Transformation Of South African Private Law After Twenty Years Of Democracy, 14 Nw. J. Int’L Hum. Rts. (Forthcoming 2016)., Christopher J. Roederer

Christopher J. Roederer

In The Transformation of South African Private Law after Ten Years of Democracy, 37 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 447 (2006), I evaluated the role of private law in consolidating South Africa’s constitutional democracy. There, I traced the negative effects of apartheid from public law to private law, and then to the law of delict, South Africa’s counterpart to tort law. I demonstrated that the law of delict failed to develop under apartheid and that the values animating the law of delict under apartheid were inconsistent with the values and aspirations of South Africa’s democratic transformation. By the end of …

What Can Corporations Teach Governments About Democratic Equality?, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Democracies place great faith in the principle of one-person/one-vote. Business corporations and other private entities, in contrast, typically operate under the one-share/one-vote rule, allocating control in proportion to ownership. Why the difference? In times past, we might have cited the differing ends of public and private institutions. Whereas public democracies aim at promoting the general welfare of an entire political community, private entities aim at more specific goals, such as generating profits or managing a cooperative residence. As business entities have grown in size and in the range of services they provide, however, the distinction between public and private governance …

The Neglected Tort — Breach Of Statutory Duty And Workplace Injuries Under The Model Work Health And Safety Law, Neil J. Foster, Ann E. Apps

Neil J Foster

The tort of ‘breach of statutory duty’ (BSD) operates at the intersection of private and public law by providing a civil remedy for those whose injuries were sustained as a consequence of a statutory breach. One of the areas where the tort has clear relevance is the area of work health and safety, with the courts almost invariably holding that the breach of a statute primarily designed to protect workers from injury will provide them with a civil remedy as well as having criminal law consequences. The tort continues to be recognised in this area at the highest judicial level …

Dualism And Doctrine, Alex Stein, Dov Fox

Alex Stein

What kinds of harm among those that tortfeasors inflict are worthy of compensation? Which forms of self-incriminating evidence are privileged against government compulsion? What sorts of facts constitute a criminal defendant’s intent? Existing doctrine pins the answer to all of these questions on whether the injury, facts, or evidence at stake are “mental” or “physical.” The assumption that operations of the mind are meaningfully distinct from those of the body animates fundamental rules in our law.

A tort victim cannot recover for mental harm on its own because the law presumes that he is able to unfeel any suffering arising …

Catalogs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky

Alex Stein

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …

Bubbles (Or, Some Reflections On The Basic Laws Of Human Relations), Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

The Role Of The Profit Imperative In Risk Management, Christopher French

Christopher C. French