Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Torts
Tort Liability And Unawareness, Surajeet Chakravarty, David Kelsey, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Tort Liability And Unawareness, Surajeet Chakravarty, David Kelsey, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
We explore the implications of unawareness for tort law. We study cases where injurers and victims initially are unaware that some acts can yield harmful consequences, or that some acts or harmful consequences are even possible, but later become aware. Following Karni and Vierø (2013), we model unawareness by Reverse Bayesianism. We compare the two basic liability rules of Anglo-American tort law, negligence and strict liability, and argue that negligence has an important advantage over strict liability in a world with unawareness—negligence, through the stipulation of due care standards, spreads awareness about the updated probability of harm.
Brief Of Amicus Curiae Gregory Klass In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellee, Gregory Klass
Brief Of Amicus Curiae Gregory Klass In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellee, Gregory Klass
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This scholar’s amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit argues that tort remedies play an important role in the contract ecosystem, including promoting efficiency in exchanges; that a party who has been defrauded in the formation of a contract is not bound by contractual limitations on tort liability; and that worries about the tortification of contract law are overblown and out of date.
Computational Complexity And Tort Deterrence, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Computational Complexity And Tort Deterrence, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Standard formulations of the economic model of tort deterrence constitute the injurer as the unboundedly rational bad man. Unbounded rationality implies that the injurer can always compute the solution to his care-taking problem. This in turn implies that optimal liability rules can provide robust deterrence, for they can always induce the injurer to take socially optimal care. In this paper I examine the computational complexity of the injurer's care-taking problem. I show that the injurer's problem is computationally tractable when the precaution set is unidimensional or convex, but that it is computationally intractable when the precaution set is multidimensional and …
The Law Against Family Separation, Carrie F. Cordero, Heidi Li Feldman, Chimène Keitner
The Law Against Family Separation, Carrie F. Cordero, Heidi Li Feldman, Chimène Keitner
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of how domestic and international law limits the U.S. government’s ability to separate foreign children from the adults accompanying them when they seek to enter the United States. As early as March 6, 2017, then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he was considering separating families at the border as a deterrent to illegal immigration as part of a “zero tolerance” policy whereby the Trump administration intended the strictest enforcement of immigration law against those migrants coming to the U.S. southern border . Kelly did not say upon what …
A Unilateral Accident Model Under Ambiguity, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
A Unilateral Accident Model Under Ambiguity, Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Standard accident models are based on the expected utility framework and represent agents’ beliefs about accident risk with a probability distribution. Consequently, they do not allow for Knightian uncertainty, or ambiguity, with respect to accident risk and cannot accommodate optimism (ambiguity loving) or pessimism (ambiguity aversion). This paper presents a unilateral accident model under ambiguity. To incorporate ambiguity, I adopt the Choquet expected utility framework and represent the injurer’s beliefs with a neoadditive capacity. I show that neither strict liability nor negligence is generally efficient in the presence of ambiguity. In addition, I generally find that the injurer’s level of …
The Death Of Reliance, Randy E. Barnett
The Death Of Reliance, Randy E. Barnett
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In the mid-1970s, it was an article offaith that contract was not properly conceived as a means by which persons could, by their own choice, make law for themselves to govern their relations. Instead, contract was thought best conceived as the rectification of injuries persons may have caused by their verbal conduct in much the same way that persons have a duty to rectify the injuries caused by their physical acts. With contracts, these injuries consisted of detrimental reliance on the words of another. So conceived, both contract and tort duties are imposed by law, and do not arise from …