Law Commons^™

Of Equal Wrongs And Half Rights, Gideon Parchomovsky, Peter Siegelman, Steven Thel

All Faculty Scholarship

With a tiny handful of exceptions, common law jurisprudence is predicated on a “winner-take-all” principle: the plaintiff either gets the entire entitlement at issue or collects nothing at all. Cases that split an entitlement between the two parties are exceedingly rare. While there may be sound reasons for this all-or-nothing rule, we argue in this Article that the law should prefer equal division of an entitlement in a limited but important set of property, tort and contracts cases. The common element in such cases is a windfall, a gain or loss that occurs despite the fact that no ex ante …