Law Commons^™

Mississippi River Stories: Lessons From A Century Of Floods And Hurricanes, Sandra Zellmer, Christine Klein

Sandi Zellmer

n the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the nation pondered how a relatively weak Category 3 storm could have destroyed an entire region. Few appreciated the extent to which a flawed federal water development policy transformed this apparently natural disaster into a “manmade” disaster; fewer still appreciated how the disaster was the predictable, and indeed predicted, sequel to almost a century of similar disasters. This article focuses upon three such stories: the Great Flood of 1927, the Midwest Flood of 1993, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005. Taken together, the stories reveal important lessons, including the inadequacy of engineered flood …

The Insurance Function Of Contracts Revisited, Bruno Meyerhof Salama

Bruno Meyerhof Salama

One of the central problems in contract law is to define the frontier between legal and illegal breaches of promises. The distinction between good and bad faith is perhaps the conceptual tool most commonly used to tell one from the other. Lawyers spend a lot of energy trying to frame better definitions of the concepts of good and bad faith based on principles of ethics or justice, but often pay much less attention to theories dealing with the incentives that can engender good faith behavior in contractual relationships. By describing the economics of what Stiglitz defined as “explicit” and “implicit” …

The Three Faces Of Retainer Care: Crafting A Tailored Regulatory Response, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Retainer care arrangements allow patients to pay a fee directly to a physician's office in order to obtain special access to care. Practices usually convert to retainer status by concentrating their attention on a small panel and dropping the majority of their patients. Proponents call retainer care a triumph of consumer-directed health care; opponents deride it as boutique medicine. Both sides are deploying a variety of legal tactics in order to attain their goals.

After surveying these conflicts, this article clarifies what is at stake by analyzing the three key features of retainer care: preventive care, queue-jumping, and amenity-bundling. Most …

What You Should Know Before You Leave The System, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

Discharging young people from foster care with no place to go, no source of income, and no health insurance is not just wrong-it's illegal. Although every state's laws are different, all states have an obligation to make sure you are able to live on your own before forcing you to leave the foster care system. In New York, you can remain in foster care until you are 21. However, once you turn 18, you must agree to remain in care by either signing an agreement or telling the judge in court that you want to stay in care. You cannot …

Civil Authority Order Provisions In Business Interruption Insurance Policies: Why The Unique Circumstances Surrounding The Hurricane Katrina Evacuation Will Result In More Policyholder Recoveries Than Those Received By 9/11 Policyholders, Jennifer Cook

Student Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Physicians' Insurance Limits And Malpractice Payments: Evidence From Texas Closed Claims, 1990-2003, Kathryn Zeiler, Charles Silver, Bernard Black, David Hyman, William Sage

Faculty Scholarship

Physicians' insuring practices influence their incentives to take care when treating patients, their risk of making out-of-pocket payments in malpractice cases, and the adequacy of compensation available to injured patients. Yet, these practices and their effects have rarely been studied. Using Texas Department of Insurance data on 9,525 paid malpractice claims against physicians that closed 1990-2003, we provide the first systematic evidence on levels of coverage purchased by physicians with paid liability claims and how those levels affect out-of-pocket payments and patient compensation. We find that these physicians carried much less insurance than is conventionally believed, that their real primary …

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act Of 2008: History, Successes, And Future Considerations, Christine Formas Norris

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Lost Legislative History Of The Equal Rights Amendment: Lessons From The Unpublished 1983 Markup By The House Judiciary Committee, Paul Taylor, Philip G. Kiko

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between Defense Counsel, Policyholders, And Insurers: Nevada Rides Yellow Cab Toward "Two-Client" Model Of Tripartite Relationship. Are Cumis Counsel And Malpractice Claims By Insurers Next?, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

It happens constantly in civil litigation. An insurance company hires a lawyer to defend its policyholder from a third party’s claim of injury. But just who is the lawyer’s “client?” Is it the policyholder who is the named defendant in the case and is “represented” in court proceedings? Or is it the insurer who, in most cases, selected the attorney, pays the attorney, supervises the litigation, and has (by the terms of the liability insurance policy) the right to settle the case, even over the objections of the policyholder? Ordinarily, the liability insurer has both the duty to defend a …

Setting The Limits In Texas Construction Law: A Look At The Surety's Limitations Under Indemnity Agreements And Equitable Subrogation Comment., John C. Warren

St. Mary's Law Journal

To clarify divergent case law, Texas courts should adopt good faith as the necessary standard governing indemnity agreements. Texas court decisions limiting settlement of bond claims by sureties can be split into three categories: (1) those cases where indemnity agreements fail to vest authority in the indemnitee to settle claims or require a good faith standard; (2) those expressly stating indemnitees have authority to settle claims in good faith; and (2) those expressly vesting a surety with exclusive rights to determine which bonded claims should be settled. Under the first line of cases courts apply common law indemnity principles requiring …

Using Insurance Law And Policy To Interpret The Tax Code's Loss And Medical Expense Provisions, Andrew Blair-Stanek

Andrew Blair-Stanek

No abstract provided.