Law Commons^™

A New Approach To Old Cases: Reconsidering Statutes Of Limitation, Ehud Guttel, Michael Novick

Ehud Guttel

Statutes of limitation currently occur in two forms. The first and traditional form defines a fixed period within which the plaintiff may file her claim, and bars a claim that is filed after this period. The second form, the discovery rule, softens the traditional statute’s bar when the plaintiff is reasonably unaware, for some time after the harm occurs, of some of the facts essential to her claim.

This Article proposes a new model of statue of limitation that transforms temporal limitation from a sanction rule to a price rule. The traditional regime and the discovery rule divide time into …

Overcorrection, Ehud Guttel

Ehud Guttel

Models of rational thinking assume that individuals who need to add information and then subtract it will return to their original starting point. Empirical studies, however, show that individuals exposed to such addition-subtraction processes systematically tend to overcorrect. One study, for example, compared evaluations of two job candidates. The first candidate had two positive recommendation letters. The second candidate had a third, negative letter that was eventually discovered to be irrelevant. Participants perceived the second candidate as better, even though, in the end, both candidates presented the same information. The introduction and later rejection of the negative information led to …