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Tort Theory And The Restatement, In Retrospect, Keith N. Hylton
Tort Theory And The Restatement, In Retrospect, Keith N. Hylton
Faculty Scholarship
This is my third paper on the Restatement (Third) of Torts. In my first paper, The Theory of Tort Doctrine and the Restatement (Third) of Torts, I offered a positive economic theory of the tort doctrine that had been presented in the Restatement (Third) of Torts: General Principles, and also an optimistic vision of how positive theoretical analysis could be integrated with the Restatement project. In my second paper, The Economics of the Restatement and of the Common Law, I set out the utilitarian-economic theory of how the common law litigation process could generate optimal (efficient, wealth-maximizing) rules and compared …
Why The Actual Malice Test Should Be Eliminated, John M. Kang
Why The Actual Malice Test Should Be Eliminated, John M. Kang
Faculty Scholarship
Under traditional common law, a plaintiff could recover damages for libel if she could prove that the defendant had published a factual statement about the plaintiff that tended to injure the plaintiff’s reputation. The plaintiff, at most, was required to show negligence to recover damages for libel. While the amount of money that any given plaintiff could recover in damages was uncertain, one thing was clear: the First Amendment would not protect libel. In 1964, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court radically upended this received view of libel as unprotected speech. According to Sullivan, …
Liability Beyond Law: Conceptions Of Fairness In Chinese Tort Cases, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu
Liability Beyond Law: Conceptions Of Fairness In Chinese Tort Cases, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu
Faculty Scholarship
Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel “fair and just” in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to …