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Full-Text Articles in Law
In Praise Of Ex Ante Regulation, Brian Galle
In Praise Of Ex Ante Regulation, Brian Galle
Vanderbilt Law Review
The plaintiffs' daughter was four years old when they brought her in to the local medical clinic. Clinic staff gave the girl a sedative to keep her calm while they examined her, but they miscalculated the dose, and she later died.' Tort liability, or the specter of it, is supposed to discourage these kinds of preventable tragedies. The clinic's owner, fearing a potential crippling award to bereaved families, should have trained his staff more carefully. As it happens, the owner instead had carefully scooped all the assets out of the firm. When the girl's parents won a $34.6 million award …
Pricing Lives For Corporate Risk Decisions, W. Kip Viscusi
Pricing Lives For Corporate Risk Decisions, W. Kip Viscusi
Vanderbilt Law Review
The 2014 GM ignition-switch recall highlighted the inadequacies of the company's safety culture and the shortcomings of regulatory sanctions. The company's inattention to systematic thinking about product safety can be traced to the hostile treatment of corporate risk analyses by the courts. This Article proposes that companies should place a greater value on lives at risk than they have in previous risk analyses and that they should receive legal protections for product risk analyses. Companies' valuations of fatality risks and regulatory penalties have priced lives too low. The guidance provided by the value of a statistical life, which is currently …