Law Commons^™

The Effects Of Malpractice Tort Reform On Defensive Medicine, Katherine D. Hennesy, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Positive defensive medicine occurs when physicians order additional tests or procedures primarily to avoid malpractice liability. This paper shows the degree of defensive medicine occurring across states is related to the malpractice environment in the states. As the environment changes due to malpractice tort reform, defensive medicine practices also change. This paper shows the existence of positive defensive medicine and how it adds to total health care expenditures for head trauma victims in 23 states in 2000. Moreover, given different malpractice environments across states, we witness variations in defensive medicine practices leading to differences in health care expenditures.

“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”: Airline Liability For Checked-In Jewelry, Eloisa Rodriguez-Dod

Faculty Publications

It is expected that when you arrive at an airport you most likely will have to check in a bag or two. What is not expected, however, is that someone would rummage through your baggage and take your belongings. Unfortunately, this happens frequently. A passenger packs her jewelry in her luggage, checks that luggage in, boards her flight, and never sees that jewelry again. Once she discovers the missing jewelry, her options for recovering the loss are quite limited.

This article examines the history and current state of the law regarding airline liability for passengers’ lost belongings on domestic as …

Joint And Several Liability In Minnesota: The 2003 Model, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

The 2003 amendment to Minnesota’s Comparative Act can be assessed in various ways. Whether it will have the economic impact its proponents suggest it will have is a question that is not susceptible of a ready answer now, or perhaps in the immediate future. From a fairness standpoint, any assessment of the amendment has to take into consideration the full reach of the Comparative Fault Act. It is important to understand that on balance the Act works to the disadvantage of the plaintiff in a variety of ways. The plaintiff cannot recover if the plaintiff’s fault is greater than the …

Beyond Market Share Liability: Theory Of Proportional Share Liability For Nonfungible Products, Allen K. Rostron

Faculty Works

Twenty-five years have passed since courts first adopted market share liability, a theory under which a plaintiff unable to identify the manufacturer of the product that caused his injury can recover on a proportional basis from each manufacturer that might have made the product. Courts have severely restricted the reach of this potentially powerful theory by insisting that it can apply only to products that are perfectly fungible. Most products vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, posing different levels of risk, and therefore do not satisfy the fungibility requirement. As a result, courts have applied market share liability to a very …

Mutual Assent Versus Gradual Ascent: The Debate Over The Right To Retract, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

I ended Contracts Without Consent: Exploring a New Basis for Contract Liability with a reminder that the analysis was "lacking in rigor and in nuance" and that "[i]t remains for future work to explore the extent to which the approach developed. . . has the horsepower to resolve pragmatically the problems that have proven difficult for current doctrine and to examine whether these solutions advance the various social objectives associated with contract formation." Such "future work" arrived sooner than I expected. I have now had the privilege to read the three commentaries that the University of Pennsylvania Law Review solicited, …

Contracts Without Consent: Exploring A New Basis For Contractual Liability, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This Essay explores an alternative to one of the pillars of contract law, that obligations arise only when there is "mutual assent "--when the parties reach consensus over the terms of the transaction. It explores a principle of "no-retraction," under which each party is obligated to terms it manifested and can retract only with some liability. In contrast to the all-or-nothing nature of the mutual assent regime, where preliminary forms of consent are either full-blown contracts or create no obligation, under the no-retraction regime, obligations emerge gradually, as the positions of the negotiating parties draw closer. Further, the no-retraction liability …

'Agreeing To Disagree': Filling Gaps In Deliberately Incomplete Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

Incomplete contracts have always been viewed as raising the following challenge for contract law: does the incompleteness-or, "indefiniteness," as it is usually called-rise to such a level that renders the agreement legally unenforceable? When the indefiniteness concerns important terms, it is presumed that the parties have not reached an agreement to which they intend to be bound. This "fundamental policy" is the upshot of the view that "contracts should be made by the parties, not by the courts."' When, in contrast, the indefiniteness concerns less important terms, courts supplement the agreement with gap fillers and enforce the supplemented contract.

The Appeal And Limits Of Internal Controls To Fight Fraud, Terrorism, Other Ills, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Congress responded in similar ways to 2001's major national crises: bolstering internal controls in corporate America under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in response to Enron's debacle and imposing internal controls on its financial services industry under the USA PATRIOT Act in response to 9/11's terrorism. These reflexive legislative responses to national crisis fit a pattern of proliferating controls as a first-order policy option dating to the mid-1970s. Documenting this proliferation and untangling the definition of internal controls, this Article attributes the appeal of internal controls as a policy option to systemic forces including the movements for deregulation and cooperative compliance, resistance …

Indemnity, Liability, Insolvency, David G. Carlson

Articles

Suppose A has a claim against B. B has a claim over against C. B, however, is insolvent and has not actually paid A. B's only asset is, in fact, B v C. To what extent can C claim that B v C is valueless - that B was not damaged because B was too broke to pay A?

This paper argues that the fundamental legal distinction between indemnity and liability is beginning to dissolve, because B can always pay A (and thereby give value to B v C) by borrowing the amount B owes and using B v C …

Forward [To Freedom From Contract Symposium], Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This Symposium explores freedom from contract. When I was preparing to travel from my home in Ann Arbor to the University of Wisconsin where this Symposium was to be held, my 9-year-old son asked where I was headed. I explained that a bunch of people and I were going to meet and talk about freedom from contract, but the boy seemed unsure what this exchange was going to be about. I tried to translate: "It is about making promises that you don't really have to keep." This sounded surprising to him. He raised an inquisitive brow, and I knew he …