Law Commons^™

Tort Law And Civil Recourse, Mark A. Geistfeld

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Recognizing Wrongs. by John C.P. Goldberg and Benjamin C. Zipursky.

Competition Wrongs, Nicolas Cornell

Articles

In both philosophical and legal circles, it is typically assumed that wrongs depend upon having one’s rights violated. But within any market-based economy, market participants may be wronged by the conduct of other actors in the marketplace. Due to my illicit business tactics, you may lose profits, customers, employees, reputation, access to capital, or any number of other sources of value. This Article argues that such competition wrongs are an example of wrongs that arise without an underlying right, contrary to the typical philosophical and legal assumption. The Article thus draws upon various forms of business law to illustrate what …

Hernandez, Bivens, And The Supreme Court’S Expanding Theory Of Judicial Abdication, William J. Aceves

Michigan Law Review Online

This Essay examines the Hernandez decision and critiques the Court’s expanding theory of judicial abdication, an approach with profound implications for civil rights and the future of the judiciary. While Hernandezinvolved a cross-border shooting, the Court’s reasoning extends to all facets of civil litigation. Accordingly, this Essay proposes a new theory of judicial engagement that would empower federal courts to grant relief for constitutional claims against federal officials. It is a theory founded in extant constitutional jurisprudence that the Court has used for over a century to apply the Bill of Rights to state and local governments—an approach that …

21st Century Cures Act: The Problem With Preemption In Light Of Deregulation, Megan C. Andersen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The 21st Century Cures Act introduced innovative changes to the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory processes. In an effort to address the slow, costly, and burdensome approval process for high-risk devices, the Cures Act modernized clinical trial data by allowing reviewers to determine whether devices merit expedited review and to consider post-market surveillance data in the premarket approval process. These changes will get life-saving devices to the people who need them faster than ever before. But the tradeoff is a greater risk of injury to the patient. The 2008 Supreme Court decision Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., held that any …

A Post-Spokeo Taxonomy Of Intangible Harms, Jackson Erpenbach

Michigan Law Review

Article III standing is a central requirement in federal litigation. The Supreme Court’s Spokeo decision marked a significant development in the doctrine, dividing the concrete injury-in-fact requirement into two subsets: tangible and intangible harms. While tangible harms are easily cognizable, plaintiffs alleging intangible harms can face a perilous path to court. This raises particular concern for the system of federal consumer protection laws where enforcement relies on consumers vindicating their own rights by filing suit when companies violate federal law. These plaintiffs must often allege intangible harms arising out of their statutorily guaranteed rights. This Note demonstrates that Spokeo’s …

Renovations Needed: The Fda's Floor/Ceiling Framework, Preemption, And The Opioid Epidemic, Michael R. Abrams

Michigan Law Review

The FDA’s regulatory framework for pharmaceuticals uses a “floor/ceiling” model: administrative rules set a “floor” of minimum safety, while state tort liability sets a “ceiling” of maximum protection. This model emphasizes premarket scrutiny but largely relies on the state common law “ceiling” to police the postapproval drug market. As the Supreme Court increasingly holds state tort law preempted by federal administrative standards, the FDA’s framework becomes increasingly imbalanced. In the face of a historic prescription medication overdose crisis, the Opioid Epidemic, this imbalance allows the pharmaceutical industry to avoid internalizing the public health costs of their opioid products. This Note …

The Search For A Grand Unified Theory Of Tort Law., Scott Hershovitz

Reviews

Theorists like to do a lot with a little. And not just because simple theories seem more elegant: we deepen our understanding when we learn that disparate phenomena are linked together. In physics, for example, the theory of thermodynamics showed us the relationship between mechanics and heat. In economics, the theory of the firm showed us that, across industries that look nothing alike, a simple principle helps explain the organization of economic activity. Of course, there is no guarantee that the disparate phenomena we suspect are linked actually are. Particle physicists continue to search for a Grand Unified Theory, which …

Tort As A Substitute For Revenge, Scott Hershovitz

Book Chapters

In 1872, the Supreme Court of Illinois decided a case called Alcorn v Mitchell. It was not the first litigation between the parties. Some years earlier, Alcorn had sued Mitchell for trespass. That suit did not go well, and at the close of the trial, just after the court adjourned, Alcorn spit in Mitchell’s face. Mitchell then turned the tables and sued Alcorn for battery. He won a judgment for $1,000, which was a lot of money back then—depending on how you think about the change in value of money over time, the present day equivalent would range from just …

Standing's Expected Value, Jonathan Remy Nash

Michigan Law Review

This Article argues in favor of standing based on expected value of harm. Standing doctrine has been constructed in a way that is oblivious to the idea of expected value. If people have suffered a loss with a positive expected value, they have suffered an "injury in fact." The incorporation of expected value into standing doctrine casts doubt on many of the Supreme Court's decisions in which it denies standing because the relevant injury is too "speculative" or is not "likely" to be redressed by a decree in the plaintiff's favor. This Article addresses this shortcoming in standing jurisprudence by …

Is Tort Law A Form Of Institutionalized Revenge, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

Viewed in a certain light, tort law serves primarily to give injury victims a means of imposing onerous burdens on their injurers. Through the remedy of injunction, tort law enables victims to restrict their injurers' freedom of action, and through the remedies of damages and restitution, tort law enables victims to deprive their injurers of money and other things of value. Moreover, tort law distinctively grants victims themselves the power to impose these burdens, rather than reserving prosecutorial discretion to the state. These features of tort law invite the charge that tort law is essentially a form of institutionalized revenge. …

What Does Tort Law Do? What Can It Do?, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

It’s not hard to describe what tort law does. As a first approximation, we might say that tort empowers those who suffer certain sorts of injuries or invasions to seek remedies from those who brought about those injuries or invasions. The challenge is to explain why tort does that, or to explain what tort is trying to do when it does that. After all, it is not obvious that we should have an institution specially concerned with the injuries and invasions that count as torts.

Comfortably Numb: Medicalizing (And Mitigating) Pain-And-Suffering Damages, Lars Noah

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Among the compensatory damages that a plaintiff may recover in tort litigation, awards for pain and suffering have attracted the most attention. Attorneys, judges, legislators, and scholars from various disciplines long have struggled to measure and make sense of this aspect of compensation for tortiously caused injuries. With the steady expansion of what falls within the rubric of nonpecuniary damages and in the types of claims eligible for such awards, to say nothing of the growth in the absolute and relative size of this portion of compensatory awards, pain-and-suffering damages have become increasingly controversial.

Although it canvasses the competing arguments …

The Unintended Consequence Of Tort Reform In Michigan: An Argument For Reinstating Retailer Product Liability, Ashley L. Thompson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Tort reform became an important issue during the 1994 Congressional Campaign as part of the Republican Party's "Contract with America. "Since then, many federal and state laws have attempted to reduce both liability and recovery in tort actions. In 1996, Michigan passed the Tort Reform Act, encompassing many drastic changes to state tort law. One provision of the Act, § 294 7, scaled back liability against non-manufacturing retailers in product liability actions. The Michigan Supreme Court interpreted the exceptions of the law narrowly and the prohibition broadly, essentially barring recovery from retailers. Since 1996, this provision has prevented victims injured …

The Truth About Torts: Rethinking Regulatory Preemption And Its Impact On Public Health, William Buzbee, William Funk, Thomas Mcgarity, Nina A. Mendelson, Sidney Shapiro, David Vladeck, Matthew Shudtz

Other Publications

As consumers, we assume that the automobiles, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and other products we purchase are generally safe for their intended uses. We rely on manufacturers to design and produce safe products, and we assume that federal regulators are conscientious watchdogs of the marketplace. In most instances, our assumptions are valid and we safely go about our lives. But the regulatory system is now frayed to the point that dangerous products sometimes slip through the cracks. Vioxx, Firestone/ATX tires, and toxics-laden children’s toys have endangered and harmed millions. In these cases, society depends on the state courts as a venue …

Preserving The Rule Of Law In America's Jails And Prisons: The Case For Amending The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Margo Schlanger, Giovanna Shay

Articles

Prisons and jails pose a significant challenge to the rule of law within American boundaries. As a nation, we are committed to constitutional regulation of governmental treatment of even those who have broken society’s rules. And accordingly, most of our prisons and jails are run by committed professionals who care about prisoner welfare and constitutional compliance. At the same time, for prisons—closed institutions holding an ever-growing disempowered population—most of the methods by which we, as a polity, foster government accountability and equality among citizens are unavailable or at least not currently practiced. In the absence of other levers by which …

Requiem For Section 1983, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Section 1983 no longer serves as a remedial statute for the people most in need of its protection. Those who have suffered a violation of their civil rights at the hands of state authorities, but who cannot afford a lawyer because they have only modest damages or seek only equitable remedies, are foreclosed from relief because lawyers shun their cases. Today civil rights plaintiffs are treated the same as ordinary tort plaintiffs by the private bar: without high damages, civil rights plaintiffs are denied access to the courts because no one will represent them. Congress understood that civil rights laws …

Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, And Disability, Samuel R. Bagenstos, Margo Schlanger

Articles

A number of states recognize hedonic damages as a separate category of recovery in tort and tort-like actions. Others consider lost enjoyment of life as an aspect of what are sometimes termed "disability" damages-damages for physical or mental impairment. Many other states permit juries to take account of lost enjoyment of life in setting compensation for pain and suffering or other forms of general damages. In all these jurisdictions, disability has loomed large. And the (explicit or implicit) view of disability is often one of tragic dependency and helplessness. As we show in Part I below, lawyers seeking hedonic damages …

Common Law Property Metaphors On The Internet: The Real Problem With The Doctrine Of Cybertrespass, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The doctrine of cybertrespass represents one of the most recent attempts by courts to apply concepts and principles from the real world to the virtual world of the Internet. A creation of state common law, the doctrine essentially involved extending the tort of trespass to chattels to the electronic world. Consequently, unauthorized electronic interferences are deemed trespassory intrusions and rendered actionable. The present paper aims to undertake a conceptual study of the evolution of the doctrine, examining the doctrinal modifications courts were required to make to mould the doctrine to meet the specificities of cyberspace. It then uses cybertrespass to …

A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

The following essay is based on the talk "Government, Citizens, and Injurious Industries: A Case Study of the Tobacco Litigation," delivered by Hanoch Dagan last May to the Detroit Chapter of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and on the article "Governments, Citizens, and Injurious Industries," by Dagan and James J. White, '62, which appeared in 75.2 New York University Law Review 254-428 (May 2000). The authors hold conflicting view on the underlying issue of this topic: tobacco company product liability. Professor Dagan holds the position that tobacco companies are liable for harm done by their products; Professor …

Governments, Citizens, And Injurious Industries, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

In this Article, Professors Hanoch Dagan and James White study the most recent challenge raised by mass torts litigation: the interference of governments with the bilateral relationship between citizens and injurious industries. Using the tobacco settlement as their case study, Dagan and White explore the important benefits and the grave dangers of recognizing governments' entitlement to reimbursement for costs they have incurred in preventing or ameliorating their citizens' injuries. They further demonstrate that the current law can help capture these benefits and guard against the entailing risks, showing how subrogation law can serve as the legal foundation of the governments' …

On Recovery In Tort For Pure Economic Loss, Eileen Silverstein

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Pure economic loss is not considered a recoverable harm in tort law. Professor Silverstein asks, "Why not?"

Identifying And Valuing The Injury In Lost Chance Cases, Todd S. Aagaard

Michigan Law Review

Any plaintiff seeking to recover in tort must prove that the defendant has breached the duty of care. Even after the plaintiff has established the defendant's breach of duty, however, issues of causation and damages remain. These two issues are frequently vexing, both conceptually and in terms of evidentiary demonstration. For example, if a plaintiff proves that a defendant acted negligently, it still may be unclear whether the plaintiff would have been injured even ip the absence of the defendant's negligence. Similarly, in assessing damages, factfinders often :find it difficult to attach a monetary value to a plaintiff's nonpecuniary losses …

Outrageous Fortune And The Criminalization Of Mass Torts, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

The case of the blameworthy-but-fortunate defendant has emerged as one of the most perplexing scenarios in mass tort litigation today. One need look no further than the front page of the newspaper to find examples of mass tort defendants said to have engaged in irresponsible conduct - even conduct that one might regard as morally outrageous in character - but that nonetheless advance eminently plausible contentions that they have not caused harm to others. This issue is not merely a matter for abstract speculation. A now-familiar mass tort scenario involves a defendant that markets a product without informing consumers about …

Corporate Judgement Proofing: A Response To Lynn Lopucki's 'The Death Of Liability', James J. White

Articles

In "The Death of Liability" Professor Lynn M. LoPucki argues that American businesses are rendering themselves judgment proof.- Using the metaphor of a poker game, Professor LoPucki claims American businesses are increasingly able to participate in the poker game without putting "chips in the pot." He argues that it has become easier for American companies to play the game without having chips in the pot because of the ease with which a modern debtor can grant secured credit, because of the growth of the peculiar form of sale known as asset securitization, because foreign havens for secreting assets are now …

Restating The Law: The Dilemmas Of Products Liability, Robert L. Rabin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Tracing products liability law from its origins to present day developments, Professor Rabin discusses the long-standing presence of interwoven strands of contract and tort ideology, as well as the perennial tensions between strict liability and negligence. These themes are evident both in the distinctly influential California case law and in the two Restatement efforts to systematize the doctrine that has emerged nationally. Rabin identifies the manner in which foundational ideological precepts of consumer expectations and enterprise liability have contributed to a continuously dynamic, if often unsettled, debate over the appropriate regime for resolving product injury claims.

Liability Of Suppliers Of Natural Raw Materials And The Restatement (Third) Of Torts: Products Liability- A First Step Toward Sound Public Policy, M. Stuart Madden

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

From its inception, the law governing liability for damage or injuries caused by defective products has pertained to potential liability for products that have been processed, finished, or fabricated. Naturally occurring raw materials, for the most part, have been considered beyond doctrinal concern, largely because characterizing a merchantable raw material, such as copper or pigiron, as defective is conceptually difficult. Nevertheless, certain doctrines that developed for the application of products liability to other products have gained sporadic application to naturally occurring raw materials, including the sophisticated purchaser defense, the bulk supplier defense, and the ingredient supplier defense. Madden argues that …

Constructing A Roof Before The Foundation Is Prepared: The Restatement (Third) Of Torts: Products Liability, Section 2(B) Design Defect, Frank J. Vandall

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability section 2(b) is a wish list from manufacturing America. It returns products liability law to something more restrictive than negligence. What is new from the Reporters is that their proposal is written on a clean sheet of paper. Messy and awkward concepts such as precedent, policy, and case accuracy have been brushed aside for the purpose of tort reform. There has been almost no attempt to evaluate strict liability precedent or the policies underlying previous cases and the Restatement (Second) section 402A. Section 2b (the roof) has been drafted with little consideration of …

Going To Trial: A Rare Throw Of The Die, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud

Articles

If it is true, as we often hear, that we are one of the most litigious societies on earth, it is because of our propensity to sue, not our affinity for trials. Of the hundreds of thousands of civil lawsuits that are filed each year in America, the great majority are settled; of those that are not settled, most are ultimately dismissed by the plaintiffs or by the courts; only a few percent are tried to a jury or a judge. This is no accident. We prefer settlements and have designed a system of civil justice that embodies and expresses …

Emphasizing The Constitutional In Constitutional Torts (Symposium On Section 1983), Christina B. Whitman

Articles

It has been surprisingly difficult to extricate constitutional litigation from torts. In this Article I would like to resist once more' the idea that tort doctrines and tort categories provide a useful model for constitutional decision-making. When it comes to deciding the merits of a constitutional claim, torts is a distraction. That is the case whether torts serves as a positive model for the constitutional cause of action or as an alternative to be shunned. As part of this argument, I also question the claim2 that Monroe v. Pape,3 the 1961 case that opened the door for damages relief under …

Victim Reparations In The Inter-American Human Rights System: A Critical Assessment Of Current Practice And Procedure, Jo M. Pasqualucci

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part II of this article analyzes the statutory authority for reparations in the Inter-American system in light of the legislative history of the American Convention's reparations provision and compares that authority with that provided for in the European human rights system. Part III sets forth the Inter-American Court's procedures for determining reparations once State responsibility has been established. Part IV evaluates the parties who may receive reparations. Part V analyzes the types of reparations provided generally under international law and specifically in the Inter-American system. Part VI criticizes the Court's determination to grant only a small share of the reparations …