Law Commons^™

Making Sense Of Abatement As A Tort Remedy, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

Controversy over public nuisance in recent high profile cases invites the question of whether, and to what extent, it is limited by its roots in tort law. This article, which was prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” focuses on causes of action in which the state seeks to enjoin the defendant by requiring that it abate the consequences of the invasion of a public right. In the most controversial of these public nuisance actions, such as lead paint and opioids, the wrongful conduct that is remedied by the injunctive relief has already ceased, and the state does …

Aaron Twerski: Practical Wisdom At Ground Zero, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

This Article celebrates Professor. Aaron Twerski’s “practical wisdom” in crafting a solution (with Jim Henderson) to a problem faced by Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the so-called 9/11 First Responder cases. The problem was that Congress did not include these plaintiffs within the Victims Compensation Fund (“VCF”) despite there being every reason to suspect that the interaction of workersman’s compensation law and tort law, if left to operate on their own, would generate a politically unacceptable outcome. Despite his clear misgivings – —expressed decades earlier – —about allowing those who control the workplace to enjoy the benefits of limited liability guaranteed …

Inventing Deportation Arrests, Lindsay Nash

Articles

At the dawn of the federal deportation system, the nation’s top immigration official proclaimed the power to authorize deportation arrests “an extraordinary one” to vest in administrative officers. He reassured the nation that this immense power—then wielded by a cabinet secretary, the only executive officer empowered to authorize these arrests—was exercised with “great care and deliberation.” A century later, this extraordinary power is legally trivial and systemically exercised by low-level enforcement officers alone. Consequently, thousands of these officers—the police and jailors of the immigration system— now have the power to solely determine whether deportation arrests are justified and, therefore, whether …

Just Kidding? The Problem Of Unenforceable Waivers Of Liability, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

In their forthcoming article, Unenforceable Waivers, Edward Cheng, Ehud Guttel, and Yuval Procaccia (“CGP”) ask an embarrassing question: Why do businesses require customers to sign waivers that have been struck down by courts in published opinions that are available not only to their lawyers but also to their customers? In this Jot, I praise CGP for their sharp eye–this is torts scholarship at its best–and then evaluate their suggestions for reform.

Third-Party Releases Under The Bankruptcy Code After Purdue Pharma, Jeanne L. Schroeder, David G. Carlson

Articles

The biggest bankruptcy case ever (as measured by unsecured claims against a debtor-in-possession) is In re Purdue Pharma, LLC. The bankruptcy court affirmed a plan discharging the Sackler family (equity owners and often officers of Purdue) of all “derivative” claims that belonged to the debtor-in-possession. The settlement was bought for a substantial sum payable over time by the Sacklers. A debtor-in-possession is the sole owner of a derivative claim and has the power to bind all the creditors to a settlement. Under the Bankruptcy Code, a plan discharging derivative claims is confirmable. In fact, as we will, show, a great …

Amicus Curiae Brief Of Professors Anthony J. Sebok And John C. P. Goldberg In Support Of Appellee The Devereux Foundation, Inc., Anthony J. Sebok

Amicus Briefs

Amici Anthony J. Sebok and John C. P. Goldberg are law professors with a particular focus in the field of tort law and damages. As scholars in this field, Amici recognize that the issues raised in this case are of tremendous importance to the history, theory, and development of tort law in the United States. The distinction between compensatory damages and punitive damages has long been recognized in both U.S. and Georgia law. Amici have a distinct interest in this Court reaching a correct decision with the benefit of complete and accurate historical information regarding the awarding of punitive damages …

The Deep Architecture Of American Covid-19 Tort Reform 2020-21, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

The rapid emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic produced massive state actions to protect in public health through the exercise of the police powers by local, state and national governments. In the United States there were calls early in the crisis to exercise the state’s power over tort law: As early as April 2020, the American Tort Reform Association published a White Paper, Responding to the Coming Lawsuit Surge that called for “reasonable constraints on . . . lawsuits that pose an obstacle to the coronavirus response effort, place businesses in jeopardy, and further damage the economy.”

This article, prepared for …

Law’S Duct Tape? Using Public Nuisance To Fix The Holes In Administrative Law, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

Public nuisance is in the news again. Three important opioid cases have been recently decided. In November plaintiffs lost a bench trial in California state court, and eight days later, the Oklahoma Supreme Court reversed a $465 million trial verdict, holding that, as a matter of law, public nuisance does not extend to the manufacturing or marketing of prescription drugs. About a week later, a jury in a bellwether, the Ohio federal MDL, held that pharmacies caused a public nuisance by failing to respond to curb medically unnecessary prescriptions.

Going Rogue: The Supreme Court's Newfound Hostility To Policy-Based Bivens Claims, Joanna C. Schwartz, Alexander A. Reinert, James E. Pfander

Articles

In Ziglar v. Abbasi, 137 S. Ct. 1843 (2017), the Supreme Court held that a proposed Bivens remedy was subject to an exacting special factors analysis when the claim arises in a “new context.” In Ziglar itself, the Court found the context of the plaintiffs’ claims to be “new” because, in the Court’s view, they challenged “large-scale policy decisions concerning the conditions of confinement imposed on hundreds of prisoners.” Bivens claims for damages caused by unconstitutional policies, the Court suggested, were inappropriate.

This Essay critically examines the Ziglar Court’s newfound hostility to policy-based Bivens claims. We show that an …

The Mdl Revolution And Consumer Legal Funding, Ronen Avraham, Lynn A. Baker, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

Third-party consumer legal funding, where financial companies advance money on a nonrecourse basis to assist individual plaintiffs with living expenses, is an increasingly popular and controversial part of American litigation. And consumers with mass tort claims pending in Multi-District Litigations (MDLs) constitute the fastest growing sector of those seeking assistance from this billion-dollar funding industry. Policy makers, mass tort plaintiffs' lawyers, and scholars have increasingly raised concerns about exorbitant interest rates and have called for regulations to protect vulnerable consumers from “predatory lending.” To date, however, the policy debate has largely relied on anecdotes and speculation because flinders have not …

Beware Of Strangers Bearing Gifts, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

A familiar rhetorical trope in modern advocacy is: “Imagine if visitors from outer space were observing x; how would they describe it?” The payoff of this exercise is to get the audience to see that the view proposed by the speaker, while superficially unfamiliar, is actually more perceptive than the conventional understanding of the practice at issue. The subtext is that only with the benefit of insights gleaned from a great distance (or an unusual perspective) can those immersed in a practice truly understand it.

New Federalism And Civil Rights Enforcement, Alexander A. Reinert, Joanna C. Schwartz, James E. Pfander

Articles

Calls for change to the infrastructure of civil rights enforcement have grown more insistent in the past several years, attracting support from a wide range of advocates, scholars, and federal, state, and local officials. Much of the attention has focused on federal-level reforms, including proposals to overrule Supreme Court doctrines that stop many civil rights lawsuits in their tracks. But state and local officials share responsibility for the enforcement of civil rights and have underappreciated powers to adopt reforms of their own. This Article evaluates a range of state and local interventions, including the adoption of state law causes of …

Counterterrorism 2.0, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

Are there any lessons to be gleaned for combatting the rising threat of white nationalist terrorism today from the U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 twenty years on? This symposium reflection suggests that among the most important lessons may be in avoiding the conceptually defining characteristics of the early U.S. response in 2001. Detainee torture and abuse, the embrace of trial by newly formed military commission, and other misguided policies and practices whose effects are still felt today were set in motion in the first few weeks after the attacks, driven by the instinct to do something, bolstered by …

Mdl Drano: Rule 23-Based Solutions To Mass Tort Buildup, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of Personal Liability: Who Pays When Bivens Claims Succeed, James E. Pfander, Alexander A. Reinert, Joanna C. Schwartz

Articles

In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, the Supreme Court held that federal law creates a right to sue federal officials for Fourth Amendment violations. For the last three decades, however, the Court has cited the threat of individual liability and the burden of government indemnification on agency budgets as twin bases for narrowing the right of victims to secure redress under Bivens. In its most recent decisions, Ziglar v. Abbasi and Hernandez v. Mesa, the Court said much to confirm that it now views personal liability less as a feature of the Bivens liability rule than …

I Pity The Fool: Ori Herstein’S Defense Of The Klutz, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

The sad story of Menlove, the defendant in the English case Vaughn v. Menlove is well known to all first-year torts students. Menlove was born, according to his lawyer, with the “misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence,” and, as a result did something quite imprudent with flammable material that no person of average or typical intelligence (or judgment) would have done, resulting in a fire that damaged the plaintiff, his neighbor.

Rediscovering The Issue Class In Mass Tort Mdls, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

Articles

For the past twenty-plus years, MDL transferee judges have essentially regarded the class device as unavailable as they struggle to organize masses of tort actions sent their way by the JPML. Even the badges and incidents of class practice, in the form of common-fund-based approaches to attorney compensation and lead-counsel structures for case organization, have come under attack from commentators who insist that mass-tort MDLs should not be treated as “quasi-class actions,” and that Rule 23 does not present a “grab bag” from which MDL judges may pick and choose the most convenient implements. Leading lights of the complex litigation …

Is Less Really More? Abraham And Kendrick On Getting Rid Of Affirmative Duties, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

When it comes to inherited scholarly categories and taxonomies, a prominent strand of modern American tort scholarship pursues a particular kind of deflationary agenda. The First and Second Restatements divided the law of negligence into sub-rules distinguished by spurious differences (for example, the section on “type of negligent acts” distinguished between “Use of Incompetent or Defective Instrumentalities” and “Want of Preparation”). The Third Restatement combined many rules that could be brought under a more general description – the laundry list of types of negligent acts has been radically pruned, leaving just a handful, such as “negligent failure to warn”.

Qualified Immunity At Trial, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

Qualified immunity doctrine is complex and important, and for many years it was assumed to have an outsize impact on civil rights cases by imposing significant barriers to success for plaintiffs. Recent empirical work has cast that assumption into doubt, at least as to the impact qualified immunity has at pretrial stages of litigation. This Essay adds to this empirical work by evaluating the impact of qualified immunity at trial, a subject that to date has not been empirically tested. The results reported here suggest that juries are rarely asked to answer questions that bear on the qualified immunity defense. …

Doing Away With Battery Law, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

Steve Sugarman is one of contemporary tort law’s leading figures, and one feature of his career which stands out is that he is willing to challenge modern orthodoxy. As the title of his classic 1985 article, Doing Away With Tort Law suggests, Sugarman is willing to recommend sweeping changes to private law. In Restating the Tort of Battery, Sugarman offers a proposal almost as radical as his 1985 proposal to get rid of tort law. Although he doesn’t say he wants to get rid of battery, once he is finished “restating” it, it is hard to see what is …

What Is It Like To Think Like A Pre-Modern?, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

There are a number of ways to tell the story of the change in American tort law that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some, like John Witt, Lawrence Friedman, and Mort Horwitz, focus on changes in material conditions. Others, like Richard Posner, Charles Gregory, and Robert Rabin, focus on changes in intellectual or doctrinal beliefs about the nature of tort law, and the best mix of rules to achieve its ends.

What Happens If We Call Discrimination A Tort?, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

Sandra Sperino’s Let’s Pretend Discrimination is a Tort, 75 Ohio St. L.J. 1107 (2014), argues that if the United States Supreme Court is really serious about treating Title VII and other federal anti-discrimination laws as nothing more than extensions of tort law, then the current Supreme Court’s anti-plaintiff approach is insupportable. Sperino does not hide her personal disapproval of the current trend to “tortify” federal anti-discrimination law (especially Title VII), but she recognizes that the fight against discrimination may have to be fought “through any means necessary” (to quote Malcolm X, not Sperino). So her article is a bit …

Does Tort Law Empower?, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

Ori Herstein’s How Tort Law Empowers takes on the question of whether and how tort law empowers victims. Herstein presents himself as a friendly critic of civil recourse theory, and offers an amendment that he claims makes the theory both more plausible and less interesting. Like many friendly amendments, it is an offer that must be carefully examined before it is accepted.

European Legal Development: The Case Of Tort: Comparative Studies In The Development Of The Law Of Tort In Europe, Vol 9, Anthony Sebok

Articles

This review addresses volumes 7-9 of the series Comparative Studies in the Development of the Law of Torts in Europe, edited by John Bell and David Ibbetson and published by Cambridge University Press.

Why Answer?, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

Prof. Nils Jansen’s new article, The Idea of Legal Responsibility, is an ambitious work of tort theory. Jansen engages some of the most basic questions of private law. The article’s rewards are found on two levels. First, the argument it propounds—that responsibility in tort can be usefully (if not exclusively) framed in terms of restitution– is intriguing and offers another take on corrective justice. Second, the framework around which Jansen builds his argument – the evolution of the law of restitution in scholastic and early modern European private law– is one that may be unfamiliar to many common lawyers. …

Are Risks Wrong?, Anthony J. Sebok

Online Publications

In The Moral Significance of Risking, John Oberdiek offers a theory of why risk imposition is prima facie wrong. Oberdiek admits that his argument will only be persuasive if he applies it to risk imposition in its purest form (what he calls “risking”). Risking’s moral significance – if it has any – must be based on the imposition of the risk of harm, and not the harm itself. In other words, if risking is wrong, it shouldn’t matter in our evaluation of it that the risk of injury never ripened into an injury. Thus, second-order effects of risking on …

Asking The First Question: Reframing Bivens After Minneci, Alexander A. Reinert, Lumen N. Mulligan

Articles

In Minneci v. Pollard, decided in January 2012, the Supreme Court refused to recognize a Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents suit against employees of a privately run federal prison because state tort law provided an alternative remedy, thereby adding a federalism twist to what had been strictly a separation-of-powers debate. In this Article, we show why this new state-law focus is misguided. We first trace the Court’s prior alternative-remedies-to-Bivens holdings, illustrating that this history is one narrowly focused on separation of powers at the federal level. Minneci’s break with this tradition raises several concerns. On a …

Tribal Rituals Of The Mdl: A Comment On Williams, Lee, And Borden, Repeat Players In Multidistrict Litigation, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

No abstract provided.

Does Qualified Immunity Matter?, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

In litigation brought pursuant to Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), most commentators agree that qualified immunity plays a substantial role in limiting plaintiffs' ability to recover compensation. Many find this tradeoff acceptable, in part because of concerns of fairness to government official defendants and in part because courts may still play a central role in announcing the law without worrying over the retroactive effect their decision will have on the personal funds of the defendant official.

This paper considers the different role that qualified immunity may play in …

Legal Positivism As An Idea About Morality, Martin J. Stone

Articles

I ask what a proper critical target for 'legal positivism' might be. I argue that utilitarian moral theory, and more generally fully directive moral theories, are unacknowledged motivations for legal positivism. Contemporary debate about 'the nature of law' is, historically speaking, much more of a footnote to utilitarianism than has been recognized.