Torts Commons^™

The Case For A "Strong" Regulatory Compliance Defense, Richard C. Ausness

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Predicting Future Sources Of Mass Toxic Tort Litigation, Jeffrey A. Foran, Bernard D. Goldstein, John A. Moore, Paul Slovic

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

The authors describe the efforts of an expert working group to identify potential sources, over the next five to ten years, of future mass litigation and report on the group's consensus conclusions.

Letters Of Credit: Highlights Of Revised Article 5, Edwin E. Smith, James J. White

Other Publications

1. Under what circumstances is it bad faith for an issuer to honor a letter of credit in the face of an applicant's offer of proof of fraud by the beneficiary? 2. What is the issuer's obligation where there is a waiver by the applicant that the issue chooses not to honor? 3. What are the rights of transferees of transferable letters of credit and assigness of proceeds?

Contributory Negligence, Comparative Negligence, And Stare Decisis In North Carolina, Steven Gardner

Campbell Law Review

Part I of this article examines the contributory negligence doctrine and its history in the United States and North Carolina. Part II describes some of the criticism levelled at the contributory negligence doctrine. Part III examines the comparative negligence doctrine, including a-description of the types of comparative negligence systems, a history of the doctrine, and a look at the history of comparative negligence bills in the North Carolina General Assembly, concentrating on the several comparative negligence bills introduced in the 1980s and one of the principal arguments made against the bills. Part IV discusses North Carolina's stare decisis jurisprudence and …

Municipal Liability For Negligent Inspections In Sinning V. Clark - A 'Hollow' Victory For The Public Duty Doctrine, Frank Swindell

Campbell Law Review

This Note examines the North Carolina Court of Appeal's decision in Sinning v. Clark. First, the Note briefly reviews governmental immunity in code enforcement cases. Second, the Note provides an historical overview of the public duty doctrine and examines the legal analysis which other jurisdictions have used to reject the public duty doctrine in inspection cases. Next, the Note discusses North Carolina's concept of governmental immunity and surveys North Carolina's application of the public duty doctrine, including the doctrine's application in Lynn v. Overlook Development. Fourth, the Note analyzes the Sinning court's application of the public duty doctrine in light …

Judicial Boilerplate Language As Torts Decisional Litany: Four Problem Areas In North Carolina, Charles E. Daye

Campbell Law Review

This article discusses four selected examples from the tort law of North Carolina. These examples isolate instances in which the result of a case might not have warranted the language used or when the language of the cases was picked up and carried forward in subsequent cases without adequate analysis. Perhaps attorneys can point out these problems to the courts, and perhaps the courts might choose to make helpful clarifications.

Consumer Choice In The North Carolina Auto Insurance Market, Jeffrey O'Connell, Stephen Carroll, Michael Horowitz, Allan Abrahamse, Bradley Miliauskas

Campbell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Punitive Damages In Ancient Roman And Contemporary American Tort Law, Esther Julia Sonntag

LLM Theses and Essays

Both ancient Roman and contemporary American tort law recognize a type of damages that, instead of compensating the plaintiff for harm suffered, punishes the wrongdoer. In American law, courts can award two distinct amounts of money: compensatory damages for the plaintiff’s loss, and punitive damages as punishment and deterrence. Ancient Roman law had more extreme forms of remedies. In both legal systems there has been a trend to restrict punitive damages over time. The United States made efforts in the 1980s to place caps on punitive damages, which were referred to as “relics of the past,” and enhance requirements for …

The Continuity Of The Enterprise Doctrine: Corporate Successorship In United States Law, Phillip Blumberg

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

A Dangerous Direction: Legal Intervention In Sexual Abuse Survivor Therapy, Cynthia Grant Bowman, Elizabeth Mertz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Defectiveness Restated: Exploding The "Strict" Products Liability Myth, David G. Owen

Faculty Publications

Strict liability in tort has occupied the core of modern products liability doctrine ever since Dean Prosser first penned the most often cited Restatement section in history-section 402A of the Second Restatement of Torts. In the Third Restatement, the ALl has completely restructured the definition of product defectiveness. The inscrutable phrase that has confounded courts and commentators for so many years- "defective condition unreasonably dangerous"- is now trifurcated according to the separate types of product defects: manufacturing defects, design defects, and warnings defects. In this important article, Professor Owen explores the conceptual developments that led to the restated liability formulations …

Feminism For Men: Legal Ideology And The Construction Of Maleness, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

It may seem a little odd to suggest that feminist theory has overlooked men. Yet, in several important respects, apart from the role of culprit, men have been largely omitted from feminism. Feminist legal theorists have paid mild attention to the "Can men be feminists?" question but this issue is usually relegated to footnotes. The negative effect gender role stereotypes have on men is typically subsidiary to the main focus of feminist legal literature, which has concentrated on documenting the patterns of subordination of women and on questions of feminist ideology.

The primary purpose of this article is to suggest …

Intentional Infliction Of Mental Distress In Montana, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

In several recent opinions, the Montana Supreme Court indicated its willingness to recognize intentional infliction of mental distress as an independent tort, even as the court stated that no plaintiff had presented a factual situation which would satisfy the elements of the cause of action. In the 1995 case of Sacco v. High Country Independent Press, Inc., the Montana Supreme Court held that an "independent cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress will arise under circumstances where serious or severe emotional distress to the plaintiff was the reasonably foreseeable consequence of the defendant's intentional act or omission. " …

Prescription Drug Design Liability Under The Proposed Restatement (Third) Of Torts: A Reporter's Perspective, James A. Henderson Jr.

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wanted: Privacy Protection For Doctors Who Performed Abortions, Angela Christina Couch

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Jane Doe, On Behalf Of Herself And All Others Similarly Situated: Radovan Karadzic In United States District Court, Susan L. Ronn

Seattle University Law Review

In perhaps the only method available to respond with power to the horrors of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Muslim women turned to a United States court for redress under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) and the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) The district court denied jurisdiction. This Article examines the opinion of the United States District Court in Doe v. Karadzic and concludes that Jane Doe and all others similarly situated should find redress in the courts of the United States for the brutalities inflicted upon them. Federal courts should not interpret the ATCA and the TVPA so narrowly …

Litigation Outcomes In State And Federal Courts: A Statistical Portrait, Theodore Eisenberg, John Goerdt, Brian Ostrom, David Rottman

Seattle University Law Review

"U.S. Juries Grow Tougher on Plaintiffs in Lawsuits," the New York Times page-one headline reads. The story details how, in 1992, plaintiffs won 52 percent of the personal injury cases decided by jury verdicts, a decline from the 63 percent plaintiff success rate in 1989. The sound-byte explanations follow, including the notion that juries have learned that they, as part of the general population, ultimately pay the costs of high verdicts. Similar stories, reporting both increases and decreases in jury award levels, regularly make headlines. Jury Verdict Research, Inc. (JVR), a commercial service that sells case outcome information, often is …

Toward A Pragmatic Model Of Judicial Decisionmaking: Why Tort Law Provides A Better Framework Than Constitutional Law For Deciding The Issue Of Medical Futility, Brent D. Lloyd

Seattle University Law Review

Recognizing that courts will eventually have to confront the issue of medical futility, this Comment argues that there is no principled basis for omitting these difficult questions from a legal analysis of the issue and that courts should therefore decide the issue in a manner that honestly confronts them. Specifically, the argument advanced here is that courts confronted with cases of medical futility should decide the issue under principles of tort law, rather than under principles of constitutional law. The crux of this argument is that tort principles provide an open-ended analytical framework conducive to considering troublesome questions like those …

Attorney Malpractice Liability To Non-Clients In Washington: Is The New Modified Multi-Factor Balancing Test An Improvement?, Sheryl L.R. Miller

Washington Law Review

Most jurisdictions recognize a cause of action for legal malpractice against a non-client only where the attorney-client relationship is formed to benefit a third-party nonclient. This rule generally operates to preclude an attorney's potential liability to a client's adversary. Washington departed from the majority in 1992 in Bohn v. Cody, where the Washington Supreme Court found that an attorney did owe a duty to his client's adversary. Two years later, in Trask v. Butler, the supreme court modified Bohn's test for determining attorney malpractice liability to third parties to conform Washington's law with the majority of jurisdictions. …

Notes: Negligently Inflicted Emotional Distress Resulting Solely From Property Damage Is Not A Compensable Injury. Dobbins V. Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, 338 Md. 341, 658 A.2d 675 (1995), Scott A. Mirsky

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

How The Tobacco Industry May Pay For Public Health Care Expenditures Caused By Smoking: A Look At The Next Wave Of Suits Against The Tobacco Industry, Mark D. Fridy

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Meeting The Objectives Of The Mda: Implied Preemption Of State Tort Claims By The Medical Device Amendments, Theresa J. Pulley Radwan

Journal of Law and Health

This article attempts to reconcile the competing purposes of the MDA, and to offer one alternative to effectuate Congress' purposes without preempting some claims and permitting others. First, this article will describe the arrangement of the MDA, including the classification provisions for medical devices and the preemption provision of the MDA. Next, this article will interpret the caselaw regarding preemption in general, and specifically preemption of state tort claims by the MDA. Finally, this article seeks to reconcile two competing purposes of Congress in enacting the MDA through implied preemption of state tort claims, with exceptions for devices which have …

Developments In Liability Theories And Defenses, Robert A. Destro

Scholarly Articles

Litigators with experience in the field of religious liberty believe that courts do not seem to take religious liberty claims and defenses very seriously; however, it is difficult to know why. To be sure, the anecdotal evidence is certainly there, not only in the reported cases, but also in the actual courtroom experiences of those who attempt to raise religious liberty claims and defenses. In one Texas tort case, a trial court judge stated that she would not permit the Church "to hide behind the first amendment;" in a Maryland case a number of years ago, I was asked by …

Product Liability Law In The Federal Arena, Sherman Joyce

Seattle University Law Review

The law of product liability has been created by state judges and legislatures. Although not widely noticed, this tradition changed when Congress enacted the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994. That legislation established an eighteen-year statute of repose for claims brought by non-commercial passengers injured or killed in accidents involving light aircraft. Until that time, product liability law had been exclusively a function of state law. Nevertheless, product liability reform legislation has been the subject of extensive examination and scrutiny by Members of the United States Congress for one and a half decades. This Article analyzes the constitutional underpinnings for …

The Remains Of Privacy's Disclosure Tort: An Exploration Of The Private Domain, Jonathan B. Mintz

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federal Influences On The Treatment Of Law And Fact In Tort Litigation, Robert E. Keeton

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Four Phases Of Promissory Estoppel, Eric Mills Holmes

Seattle University Law Review

Case law accurately delineates the four evolutionary stages of promissory estoppel. As an overview, promissory estoppel has evolved in American case law in four developmental stages: (1) Estoppel Phase, consisting initially of “defensive equitable estoppel” to estop contract defenses based on statutes of limitations and the statute of frauds. In the second part of this first phase, courts have extended “estoppel” based on representations of facts to “promissory” representations and enforced the promissory basis of the representation, thereby creating an affirmative theory of relief. Thus, this first phase of promissory estoppel consists of defensive equitable estoppel and offensive equitable estoppel. …

Illinois' Landmark Tort Reform: The Sponsor's Policy Explanation, Kirk W. Dillard

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Future Of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act: Or, Why The Fat Lady Has Not Yet Sung, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Much commentary about securities litigation shares the implicit premise that the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (Reform Act) is, for better or worse, a fait accompli – that is, legislation whose meaning is fixed and whose impact, while still debatable, is not contingent on future events. This Article sees it differently: the Reform Act is more like wet clay that has been shaped into an approximation of a human form by an apprentice craftsmen and has now been turned over to the master sculptor for the details that will spell the difference between high art and merely competent …

Some Thoughts On The Ideology Of Enterprise Llability, Robert L. Rabin

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.