Law Commons^™

A Gift Worth Dying For?: Debating The Volitional Nature Of Suicide In The Law Of Personal Property, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

Suicide poses difficult and foundational problems for the law. Those who most highly value personal autonomy, those who believe in the inviolability of human life, and those who remain uncommitted on end-of-life issues, all must settle challenging questions about suicide before advancing upon the more complex terrain of physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and infanticide. And the way in which a society fashions legal responses to suicidal choices reveals much about the society's cultural commitments and legal assumptions.

The bodies of insurance law, tort, and health care law are also among those areas of the law in which lawmakers reserve special exceptions …

Causation Requirements In Tort And Insurance Law Practice: Demystifying Some Legal Causation Riddles, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

Legal causation requirements, in both tort and insurance law, rank among the most pervasive yet most elusive and most misunderstood of all legal concepts in Anglo-American law for legal practitioners, the courts,' and academic scholars alike. Indeed, no less an authority than William Lloyd Prosser has stated that there "is perhaps nothing in the entire field of law which has called forth more disagreement, or upon which the opinions are in such a welter of confusion" than proximate cause issues, "despite the manifold attempts which have been made to clarify the subject."

Although some commentators have looked upon legal causation's …

Automotive "Crashworthiness:" An Untenable Doctrine, Stephen J. Werber

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

It is the purpose of this article to review the decisional law of automobile crashworthiness and to place it in the context of important policy considerations which justify such judicial determinations. It will be shown that the great majority of these decisions are entirely consistent with the doctine of "strict tort liability" as enunciated in section 402A of the Restatement of Torts, Second; that the questions sought to be submitted to juries in these cases are properly the subject of highly technical and complex legislative and administrative action on both a state and federal level; and that the few decisions …