Law Commons^™

Adversarial Science, Sanne H. Knudsen

Articles

Adversarial science—sometimes referred to as "litigation science" or "junk science"—has a bad name. It is often associated with the tobacco industry's relentless use of science to manufacture uncertainty and avoid liability. This Article challenges the traditional conception that adversarial science should be castigated simply because it was developed for litigation. Rather, this Article urges that adversarial science is an important informational asset that should, and indeed must, be embraced.

In the ecological context, adversarial science is vital to understanding the ecological effects of long-term toxic exposure. Government trustees and corporate defendants fund intensive scientific research following major ecological disasters like …

The Long-Term Tort: In Search Of A New Causation Framework For Natural Resources Damages, Sanne H. Knudsen

Articles

Recent scientific evidence is proving that toxic releases have long-term, unintended, and harmful consequences for the marine environment. Though a new paradigm is emerging in the scientific literature--one demonstrating that long-term impacts from oil spills are more significant than previously thought--legal scholars, regulators, and courts have yet to consider the law's ability to remedy long-term ecological harms.

While scholars have exhaustively debated causation questions related to latent injuries for toxic torts, they have overlooked the equally important and conceptually similar causation problems of long-term damages in the natural resource context. Likewise, only a few courts have considered the standards of …

Tort Liability In The Age Of The Helicopter Parent, Elizabeth G. Porter

Articles

Discussions of parental liability by courts and legal scholars are often tinged with fear: fear that government interference will chill parental autonomy; fear that parents will be held liable for their children’s every misdeed; and, recently, fear that a new generation of so-called “helicopter parents” who hover over their children’s every move will establish unrealistically high legal standards for parenting. However, in the context of common law suits against parents, these fears are misguided. To the contrary, courts have consistently shielded wealthier parents — those most likely to be defendants in civil suits — from exposure to liability for conduct …

Eggshell Economics: A Revolutionary Approach To The Eggshell Plaintiff Rule, Steve Calandrillo, Dustin E. Buehler

Articles

For more than a century, courts have universally applied the eggshell plaintiff rule, which holds tortfeasors liable for the full extent of the harm inflicted on vulnerable “eggshell” victims. Liability attaches even when the victim’s condition and the scope of her injuries were completely unforeseeable ex ante.

This Article explores the implications of this rule by providing a pioneering economic analysis of eggshell liability. It argues that the eggshell plaintiff rule misaligns parties’ incentives in a socially undesirable way. The rule subjects injurers to unfair surprise, fails to incentivize socially optimal behavior when injurers have imperfect information about expected accident …

Risk Magnified: Standing Under The Statist Lens, Mary D. Fan

Articles

Why some harms count before the courts and others do not is a matter of acute expressive and practical impact. Judicial refusal to see claimed injuries is an effective denial of legal personhood and a bar from powerful judicial machinery. The issue of “erratic, even bizarre” judicial recognition of supplicants vexed Professor Joseph Vining as early as 1978. Recent scholarship argues that injuries are seen through a subjective lens, reflecting the relative privilege of the judiciary and their concomitant difficulties in perceiving injuries to minorities and the poor. This is a troubling contention. So long as another, objective explanation remains, …

Incorporating Literary Methods And Texts In The Teaching Of Tort Law, Zahr K. Said

Articles

Literature is comparatively under-investigated as an arena for tort pedagogy and for first-year courses in the legal curriculum generally. Where literature tends to appear in law school, it most frequently does so in the form of stand-alone law-and-literature classes, which usually focus heavily on literature.

In teaching a first-year tort law course at the University of Washington School of Law, I have explicitly used literature to aid and amplify legal analysis. The emphasis has been on law, rather than on literature. Nonetheless, literary texts and methods helped my students investigate how the law conceives of, and expresses, duties and losses …

Admiralty's In Extremis Doctrine: What Can Be Learned From The Restatement (Third) Of Torts Approach?, Craig H. Allen

Articles

The in extremis doctrine has been part of maritime collision law in the U.S. for more than one hundred and sixty years. One would expect that a century and a half would provide ample time for mariners and admiralty practitioners and judges to master the doctrine. Alas, some of the professional nautical commentary and even an occasional collision case suggest that the doctrine is often misunderstood or misapplied. A fair number of admiralty writers fail to understand that the in extremis doctrine is not a single "in extremis rule," but rather several rules, all of which are related to the …

Open Robotics, M. Ryan Calo

Articles

Robotics is poised to be the next transformative technology. Robots are widely used in manufacturing, warfare, and disaster response, and the market for personal robotics is exploding. Worldwide sales of home robots—such as iRobot’s popular robotic vacuum cleaner—are in the millions. In fact, Honda has predicted that by the year 2020, it will sell as many robots as it does cars. Microsoft founder Bill Gates believes that the robotics industry is in the same place today as the personal computer (“PC”) business was in the 1970s, a belief that is significant given that there are now well over one billion …

Penalizing Punitive Damages: Why The Supreme Court Needs A Lesson In Law And Economics, Steve P. Calandrillo

Articles

The recent landmark Supreme Court decision addressing punitive damages in the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill case has brought the issue of punitive awards back into the legal limelight. Modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, most notably BMW of North America, Inc. [517 U.S. 559 (1996)], State Farm [538 U.S. 408 (2003)], Philip Morris [549 U.S. 346 (2007)], and now Exxon Shipping Co. [128 S.Ct. 2605 (2008)] in 2008, has concluded that such judgments are justified to punish morally reprehensible behavior and to send a message to evildoers. The Court, however, has increasingly emphasized that the U.S. Constitution's Due Process Clause presumptively …

Flawed Justice: Limitation Of Parental Remedies For The Loss Of Consortium Of Adult Children, William S. Bailey

Articles

This article presents the inherent contradiction between a parent-child relationship that has steadily evolved from the early 20th Century to the present and the multitude of court decisions on damages that remain studiously ignorant of this shift.

Part I of the article will set forth the common law origins of restrictions on recovery for wrongful death within the context of a shifting view of children from economic units to objects of adoration. Part II will examine the devastating impact that the loss of an adult child has on parents both from their perspectives and from now existing research.

In the …

Introduction, The Osceola After 100 Years: Its Meaning And Effect On Maritime Personal Injury Law In The United States, Craig Allen

Articles

A century ago the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in The Osceola [189 U.S. 158 (1903)], announcing four legal propositions that controlled personal injury claims by seamen at the time. On the 100th anniversary of the Court's decision, the four admiralty law professors contributing to this symposium take the opportunity to critically examine the Court's renowned decision, Congress' responses to the decision, and the effect of both The Osceola's four propositions and the responsive legislation on the remedies available to injured maritime workers in the 21st century.

In the first of the three articles that follow, Professor …

Statutory Damage Caps Are An Incomplete Reform: A Proposal For Attorney Fee Shifting In Tort Actions, Gregory A. Hicks

Articles

The premise of this article is that the currently unsettled status of noneconomic damage awards offers an opportunity to reexamine the function of such awards, and to move tort law in the direction of more stable and rational remedies, something that could not be achieved either under recently adopted damage cap statutes or through the reinstatement of unrestricted compensation of noneconomic losses.

This article has two parts. In the first part, the ambiguous role of noneconomic damages, that is, their function as makeweight compensation for noncompensable litigation expenses and as compensation for real intangible injuries, is described. This ambiguity has …