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Full-Text Articles in Law
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.
Differentiating Strict Products Liability’S Cost-Benefit Analysis From Negligence, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman
Differentiating Strict Products Liability’S Cost-Benefit Analysis From Negligence, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Dangerous products may give rise to colossal liability for commercial actors. Indeed, in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Johnson & Johnson v. Ingham, permitting a more than two billion dollar products liability damages award to stand. In his dissenting opinion in another recent products liability case, Air and Liquid Systems Corp. v. DeVries, Justice Gorsuch declared that “[t]ort law is supposed to be about aligning liability with responsibility.” However, in the products liability context, there have been ongoing debates concerning how best to set legal rules and standards on tort liability. Are general principles of …
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 …