Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Keyword
-
- Assumption of risk (2)
- Comparative fault (2)
- Damages (2)
- Negligence (2)
- ATS (1)
-
- Absent tortfeasors (1)
- Acoustic separation (1)
- American rule (1)
- Arbitration and award (1)
- Assignment (1)
- Barratry (1)
- Bioethics (1)
- Biotechnology (1)
- Bylaw (1)
- Causation (1)
- Champerty (1)
- Charter provision (1)
- Children (1)
- Civil sanctions (1)
- Class actions (1)
- Class certifications (1)
- Cognitive psychology (1)
- Common law (1)
- Comparative law (1)
- Comparative law theory (1)
- Comparative negligence (1)
- Concurrent damages (1)
- Congress (1)
- Consent (1)
- Contract Law (1)
Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in Law
Abuse Of Rights: The Continental Drug And The Common Law, Anna Di Robilant
Abuse Of Rights: The Continental Drug And The Common Law, Anna Di Robilant
Faculty Scholarship
This article explores a crucial, though often neglected, episode in the history of modern private law: the nineteenth and early twentieth century debate over the concept of “abuse of rights”. In broad terms, the formula evokes the idea of an abusive, because malicious or unreasonable, exercise of an otherwise lawful right. The doctrine was applied in a variety of subfields of private law: property, contract, and labour law. It was conceived as a response to the urgent legal questions posed by the rise of modern industrial society: the limits of workers’ right to strike, the limits of industrial enterprises’ property …
Optional Safety Devices: Delegating Design Responsibility To The Market, Aaron D. Twerski, James A. Henderson
Optional Safety Devices: Delegating Design Responsibility To The Market, Aaron D. Twerski, James A. Henderson
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Finding Fault?: Exploring Legal Duties To Return Incidental Findings In Genomic Research, Elizabeth R. Pike, Karen H. Rothenberg, Benjamin E. Berkman
Finding Fault?: Exploring Legal Duties To Return Incidental Findings In Genomic Research, Elizabeth R. Pike, Karen H. Rothenberg, Benjamin E. Berkman
Faculty Scholarship
The use of whole genome sequencing in biomedical research is expected to produce dramatic advances in human health. The increasing use of this powerful, data-rich new technology in research, however, will inevitably give rise to incidental findings (IFs), findings with individual health or reproductive significance that are beyond the aims of the particular research, and the related questions of whether and to what extent researchers have an ethical obligation to return IFs. Many have concluded that researchers have an ethical obligation to return some findings in some circumstances, but have provided vague or context-dependent approaches to determining which IFs must …
Apportioning Liability In Maryland Tort Cases: Time To End Contributory Negligence And Joint And Several Liability, Donald G. Gifford, Christopher J. Robinette
Apportioning Liability In Maryland Tort Cases: Time To End Contributory Negligence And Joint And Several Liability, Donald G. Gifford, Christopher J. Robinette
Faculty Scholarship
The Article presents a comprehensive proposal for assigning liability in tort cases according to the parties’ respective degrees of fault. The authors criticize the Court of Appeals of Maryland’s recent decision in Coleman v. Soccer Association of Columbia declining to abrogate contributory negligence, particularly the court’s notion that it should not act because of the legislature’s repeated failure to do so. The Article provides a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of comparative fault, including its effect on administrative costs, claims frequency, claims severity, insurance premiums, and economic performance. The authors propose the legislative enactment of comparative fault and …
An Exploration Of “Non-Economic” Damages In Civil Jury Awards, Herbert M. Kritzer, Guangya Liu, Neil Vidmar
An Exploration Of “Non-Economic” Damages In Civil Jury Awards, Herbert M. Kritzer, Guangya Liu, Neil Vidmar
Faculty Scholarship
Using three primary data sources plus three supplemental sources discussed in an appendix, this paper examines how well non-economic damages could be predicted by economic damages and at how the ratio of non-economic damages to economic damages changed as the magnitude of the economic damages awarded by juries increased. We found a mixture of consistent and inconsistent patterns across our various datasets. One fairly consistent pattern was the tendency for the ratio of non-economic to economic damages to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. Moreover, the variability of the ratio also tended to decline as the amount of …
Testing The Boundaries Of Family Privacy: The Special Case Of Pediatric Sibling Transplants, Doriane Lambelet Coleman
Testing The Boundaries Of Family Privacy: The Special Case Of Pediatric Sibling Transplants, Doriane Lambelet Coleman
Faculty Scholarship
A six-year-old girl suffers third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. Her chance of survival with minimal scarring is said to depend on her identical twin sister’s availability as an organ source. There are other transplant options—including the parents—but because the twins’ skin is “equivalent,” a “sibling transplant” is likely to result in a better medical and aesthetic outcome for the burned twin. Her doctor thus proposes to harvest her healthy sister’s skin on “her backside from her bra line down to the bottom of her buttocks or possibly her thighs.” This procedure would be repeated up to three …
Contract Law And The Hand Formula, Daniel P. O'Gorman
Contract Law And The Hand Formula, Daniel P. O'Gorman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Third Party Funding Of Personal Injury Tort Claims: Keep The Baby And Change The Bathwater, Terrence Cain
Third Party Funding Of Personal Injury Tort Claims: Keep The Baby And Change The Bathwater, Terrence Cain
Faculty Scholarship
In the early 1990s, a period of high-risk lending at high interest rates, a new entrant emerged in civil litigation: the Litigation Finance Company (“LFC”). LFCs advance money to plaintiffs involved in contingency fee litigation. The money is provided on a non-recourse basis, meaning the plaintiff repays the LFC only if she obtains money from the lawsuit through a settlement, judgment, or verdict. If the plaintiff does not recover anything, she will not owe the LFC anything. When she does repay the LFC, however, she could end up paying as much as 280% of the amount advanced by the LFC. …
The Three Lives Of The Alien Tort Statute: The Evolving Role Of The Judiciary In U.S. Foreign Relations, Thomas H. Lee
The Three Lives Of The Alien Tort Statute: The Evolving Role Of The Judiciary In U.S. Foreign Relations, Thomas H. Lee
Faculty Scholarship
This Article explains how the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) began in the late eighteenth century as a national security statute that the First Congress and early federal district judges saw as a way to afford damages remedies to British merchants, creditors, and other subjects whose persons or property were injured under circumstances in which treaties or the law of nations assigned responsibility to the United States. Torts committed within the United States by private American citizens were the most likely such circumstances. The ultimate aims of the statute were to avoid renewed war with Great Britain and the other European …
The Costs Of Changing Our Minds, Nita A. Farahany
The Costs Of Changing Our Minds, Nita A. Farahany
Faculty Scholarship
This isn’t quite a draft yet – it’s a concept paper. You’ll see after the first 10 pages a good bit of text in brackets, which are primarily notes for me, but it’ll give you a sense of the content of those sections. I’d like to talk through the concept – the “duty” to mitigate emotional distress damages and how courts have struggled with it, as a foray into a broader dichotomy that I see in a number of areas of law that suggest an implicit value in “cognitive liberty.” This is a smaller version of a broader book project …
Information And Causation In Tort Law: Generalizing The Learned Hand Test For Causation Cases, Keith N. Hylton
Information And Causation In Tort Law: Generalizing The Learned Hand Test For Causation Cases, Keith N. Hylton
Faculty Scholarship
This paper discusses the economics of causation in tort law, describing precise implications for precautionary incentives when courts are and are not perfectly informed. With precautionary incentives identified, we can ask whether the causation inquiry enhances welfare, and if so under what conditions. Perhaps the most important innovation applies to the Hand Formula. When causation is an issue, the probability of causal intervention should be part of the Hand test, and the generalized Hand test offers a method of distinguishing significant classes of causation cases. I close with implications for the moral significance of causation and for economic analysis of …
It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction And Oversight In Mass Torts, Tanya Pierce
It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction And Oversight In Mass Torts, Tanya Pierce
Faculty Scholarship
In 2004, just five years after introducing the drug, Vioxx, pharmaceutical company, Merck, voluntarily withdrew the prescription pain-killer after a clinical study suggested that the drug increased the risk of heart attack and stroke. But in that relatively short time, an estimated 20 million Americans had already taken the drug. By late 2007, Merck announced it would pay $4.85 billion — the largest drug settlement ever — in “global settlements” for Vioxx-related claims. These settlements ultimately included roughly 47,000 individual lawsuits and about 265 potential class actions, but the Vioxx settlements were far from global.
In 2012, a purported parallel …
The Market In Unmatured Tort Claims: Twenty-Five Years Later, Stephen G. Marks
The Market In Unmatured Tort Claims: Twenty-Five Years Later, Stephen G. Marks
Faculty Scholarship
In an article in 1989 in the Virginia Law Review, Professor Robert Cooter argued for changes in the law that would facilitate the development of a market in unmatured tort claims. An unmatured tort claim is a potential claim that a potential victim has before any injury has occurred. Cooter proposed that potential victims have the right to sell their unmatured tort claims. That is, Cooter proposed that potential victims be allowed to sell their right to sue even before an accident or injury ever occurs. Even twenty-five years later, the proposal remains both bold and imaginative, and yet it …
Exploring The Relationship Between Consent, Assumption Of Risk, And Victim Negligence, Kenneth Simons
Exploring The Relationship Between Consent, Assumption Of Risk, And Victim Negligence, Kenneth Simons
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter analyzes the nature of consensual rationales for precluding tort liability, and explores the relationship between consent to an intentional tort, assumption of risk, and victim negligence. Is consent conceptually and normatively distinguishable from assumption of risk? Yes and no: they differ in some respects, but share a common core. Are they equally valid bases for precluding, and not merely reducing, recovery? Yes: court justifiably invoke consent more often than assumption of risk, not because the doctrines differ in principle, but because of factual differences between the most common scenarios in which each arises. In paradigm consent scenarios, the …
Fee-Shifting Bylaw And Charter Provisions: Can They Apply In Federal Court? – The Case For Preemption, John C. Coffee Jr.
Fee-Shifting Bylaw And Charter Provisions: Can They Apply In Federal Court? – The Case For Preemption, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
In the first months after a decision of the Delaware Supreme Court upholding a fee-shifting bylaw under which the unsuccessful plaintiff shareholder was required to reimburse all defendants for their legal and other expenses in the litigation, some 24 public companies adopted a similar provision – either by means of a board-adopted bylaw or by placing such a provision in their certificate of incorporation (in the case of companies undergoing an IPO). In effect, private ordering is introducing a one-sided version of the “loser pays” rules. Indeed, as drafted, these provisions typically require a plaintiff who is not completely successful …
Surprisingly Punitive Damages, Bert I. Huang
Surprisingly Punitive Damages, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
Damages can add up to super-punitive amounts in unintended ways. To take a textbook example: The Defendant has caused an industrial accident or other mass tort. Plaintiff 1 sues, winning punitive damages based on the reprehensibility of that original act. Plaintiff 2 also sues – and also wins punitive damages on the same grounds. So do Plaintiff 3, Plaintiff 4, and so forth. If each of these punitive awards is directed at the same general badness of that original act, then these punishments are redundant. When such redundancy occurs, even damages that are meant to be punitive can reach surprisingly …