Law Commons^™

Fee-Shifting Statutes And Compensation For Risk, Maureen Carroll

Indiana Law Journal

A law firm that enters into a contingency arrangement provides the client with more than just its attorneys’ labor. It also provides a form of financing, because the firm will be paid (if at all) only after the litigation ends; and insurance, because if the litigation results in a low recovery (or no recovery at all), the firm will absorb the direct and indirect costs of the litigation. Courts and markets routinely pay for these types of risk-bearing services through a range of mechanisms, including state feeshifting statutes, contingent percentage fees, common-fund awards, alternative fee arrangements, and third-party litigation funding. …

Saving Money On Health Insurance Just Got A Lot Easier . . . Or Did It?: The Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act And Its Impact On The Future Of Employee Health, Zachary Maciejewski

Indiana Law Journal

This Note addresses the growing use of employer-sponsored wellness programs in the American workplace and the concomitant harms and risks these programs impose on employee privacy and insurance costs. Specifically, this Note analyzes the Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act (PEWPA)—a proposed law that would allow employers to require employees to disclose genetic information to qualify for an employer-sponsored wellness program (and the program’s associated insurance premium benefits). This Note ultimately argues that employees and employee advocacy groups must work to thwart PEWPA to preserve employee privacy in the face of mounting corporate pressure to alter the structure of employer-sponsored health …

Managing Systemic Risk In Legal Systems, J. B. Ruhl

Indiana Law Journal

The American legal system has proven remarkably robust even in the face of vast and often tumultuous political, social, economic, and technological change. Yet our system of law is not unlike other complex social, biological, and physical systems in exhibiting local fragility in the midst of its global robustness. Understanding how this “robust yet fragile” (RYF) dilemma operates in legal systems is important to the extent law is expected to assist in managing systemic risk—the risk of large local or even system-wide failures—in other social systems. Indeed, legal system failures have been blamed as partly responsible for disasters such as …

Risky Returns: Accounting For Risk In The Federal Budget, David Kamin

Indiana Law Journal

There has been a growing consensus among academics, analysts, and policymakers that the official federal budget estimates should reflect the “cost of risk”—the amount that the private market would demand to bear risk. The result would be to add tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in annual costs to the federal budget and, in combination with the budget enforcement laws now in place, make it much more difficult for the federal government to create or expand programs that involve risk—ranging from student lending to home mortgage guarantees to, potentially, broad social insurance programs like unemployment insurance. This Article …

The Kindynamic Theory Of Tort, Christopher P. Guzelian

Indiana Law Journal

Commentators complain of two major deficiencies in modern tort law: (1) that liability concepts such as "negligence" or "duty " are so vacuously defined as to permit inadvertent subjectivity and error to hinder proper case adjudication, and (2) that tort is too slow in recognizing newly discovered risks and properly compensating nascent classes of injury. We accordingly report on the Kindynamic Theory, an emerging philosophy that overcomes these twin deficiencies and sharpens understanding of poorly articulated tort intuitions

Kindynamics contends that causation is the cornerstone of tort, and that all risks are, at core, causal propositions. Contrary to its many …

Rethinking Risk-Based Environmental Cleanup, Alex Geisinger

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Aviation And Life Insurance, Robert A. Adams

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Assumed Risk Under The Federal Employment Liability Act, John D. Welman

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.