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- Mass tort; aggregate settlement; Vioxx; civil recourse; informed consent; conflict of interest; settlement; class action; aggregate litigation (1)
- Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad; punitive damages; tort law; federal preemption (1)
- Tort law; negligence; United States v. Carroll Towing; hand formula (1)
- Tort liability; injuries; product liability (1)
- Torts; costs; tort law; damages (1)
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Civil Procedure
Palsgraf, Punitive Damages, And Preemption, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Palsgraf, Punitive Damages, And Preemption, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Faculty Scholarship
This Article utilizes civil recourse theory along with a pragmatic conceptualist methodology to solve three problems in tort law: one on Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., one on punitive damages (as seen in the Supreme Court’s struggles with Philip Morris v. Williams), and one on federal preemption (as seen in the Supreme Court’s 4-4 deadlock in Warner-Lambert Company v. Kent). Confusion has been generated by a failure to recognize that -- despite the many aspects of tort law that render it importantly public -- there is something distinctively private about the common law of torts. When one firmly rejects …
Consent V. Closure, Howard M. Erichson, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Consent V. Closure, Howard M. Erichson, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Faculty Scholarship
Claimants, defendants, courts, and counsel are understandably frustrated by the difficulty of resolving mass tort cases. Defendants demand closure, but class certification has proved elusive and non-class settlements require individual consent. Lawyers and scholars have been drawn to strategies that solve the problem by empowering plaintiffs’ counsel to negotiate package deals that effectively sidestep individual consent. In the massive Vioxx settlement, the parties achieved closure by including terms that made it unrealistic for any claimant to decline. The American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation offers another path to closure: it proposes to permit clients to consent …
Torts As Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Torts As Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Faculty Scholarship
Torts scholars hold different views on why tort law shifts costs from plaintiffs to defendants. Some invoke notions of justice, some efficiency, and some compensation. Nearly all seem to agree, however, that tort law is about the allocation of losses. This Article challenges the widespread embrace of loss-based accounts as fundamentally misguided. It is wrongs not losses that lie at the foundation of tort law. Tort suits are about affording plaintiffs an avenue of civil recourse against those who have wronged them. Although torts were once routinely understood as wrongs, since Holmes’s time, tort scholars have tended to suppose that …
The Easy Case For Products Liability: A Response To Polinsky & Shavell, Benjamin C. Zipursky, John C.P. Goldberg
The Easy Case For Products Liability: A Response To Polinsky & Shavell, Benjamin C. Zipursky, John C.P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
In their article “The Uneasy Case for Product Liability,” Professors Polinsky and Shavell assert the extraordinary claim that there should be no tort liability - none at all - for injuries caused by widely-sold products. In particular, they claim to have found convincing evidence that the threat of tort liability creates no additional incentives to safety beyond those already provided by regulatory agencies and market forces, and that tort compensation adds little or no benefit to injury victims beyond the compensation already provided by various forms of insurance. In this response, we explain that, even on its own narrow terms, …
Civil Recourse, Not Corrective Justice, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Civil Recourse, Not Corrective Justice, Benjamin C. Zipursky
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.