Law Commons^™

Recovery In Louisiana Tort Law For Intangible Economic Loss: Negligence Actions And The Tort Of Intentional Interference With Contractual Relations, David Robertson

Dr David Robertson

No abstract provided.

Answering A Fool According To His Folly: Ruminations On Comparative Fault Thirty Years On, Frank L. Maraist, H. Alston Johnson Iii, Thomas C. Galligan Jr., William R. Corbett

William R. Corbett

No abstract provided.

To Drink The Cup Of Fury: Funeral Picketing, Public Discourse And The First Amendment, Steven J. Heyman

Steven J. Heyman

In Snyder v. Phelps, the Supreme Court held that the Westboro Baptist Church had a First Amendment right to picket the funeral of a young soldier killed in Iraq. This decision reinforces a position that has become increasingly prevalent in First Amendment jurisprudence – the view that the state may not regulate public discourse to protect individuals from emotional or dignitary injury. In this Article, I argue that this view is deeply problematic for two reasons: it unduly sacrifices the value of individual personality and it tends to undermine the sphere of public discourse itself by negating the practical and …

Announcing Remedies For Medical Injury: A Proposal For Medical Liability Reform Based On The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, Steven Raper

Steven E Raper MD

Recently reaffirmed, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act holds the promise of sweeping change in many critical aspects of the United States’ system of delivering health care. Indeed, medical liability reform is embedded into the DNA of the Obama presidency. Further, a Sense of the Senate statement raised a number of concerns over the current medical malpractice regime. These concerns led to the enactment of a small but conceptually important provision of the Affordable Care Act. Congress intends, however, to allow the states to develop liability reform through the allocation of 50 million dollars for State Demonstration Projects.

From …

Harmonizing The Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) With The Three Main National Systems For Healthcare Quality Improvement: The Tort, Licensure And Hospital Peer Review Systems, K Van Tassel

Katharine A. Van Tassel

According to an estimate by the Institute of Medicine made over a decade ago, treatment errors in hospitals alone caused 98,000 deaths yearly. This IOM report is proving to be very conservative. A recent Consumer Reports investigation came to the conclusion that “[m]ore than 2.25 million Americans will probably die from medical harm this decade…. That’s like wiping out the entire populations of North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It’s a manmade disaster.”

One of the reasons for this astonishing mortality rate is the normative practice of custom-based medicine in the United States. A large and rapidly growing group of …

A Case Study In The Superiority Of The Purposive Approach To Statutory Interpretation: Bruesewitz V. Wyeth , Donald G. Gifford, William L. Reynolds, Andrew M. Murad

William L. Reynolds

This Article uses the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth to examine the textualist or “plain meaning” approach to statutory interpretation. For more than a quarter-century, Justice Scalia has successfully promoted textualism, usually associated with conservatism, among his colleagues. In Bruesewitz, Scalia, writing for the majority, and his liberal colleague Justice Sotomayer, in dissent, both employed textualism to determine if the plaintiffs, whose child was allegedly harmed by a vaccine, could pursue common-law tort claims or whether their remedies were limited to those available under the no-fault compensation system established by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Despite …

Toward A Neuroscience Model Of Tort Law: How Functional Neuroimaging Will Transform Tort Doctrine, Jean Eggen, Eric Laury

Jean M. Eggen

The “neuroscience revolution” has now gained the attention of legal thinkers and is poised to be the catalyst for significant changes in the law. Over the past several decades, research in functional neuroimaging has sought to explain a vast array of human thought processes and behaviors, and the law has taken notice. Although functional neuroimaging is not yet close to being a staple in the courtroom, the information acquired from these studies has been featured in a handful of cases, including a few before the United States Supreme Court. Our assertion involves the incorporation of functional neuroscience evidence in tort …

Shaping The Disclosure Tort: Scholars' Early Importance And Modern Impotence, Jared A. Wilkerson

Jared A. Wilkerson

Legal scholars guided the creation and development of the disclosure tort for about seventy-five years (1890–1965), a period in which most states recognized a common law or statutory right to privacy. Since then, however, scholarly attempts to curb or modify the tort have yielded nothing. This article—beginning with the formalism-realism debate won by such sages as Brandeis, Pound, and Prosser and ending with modern experts like Chemerinsky, Posner, and Solove—shows that notwithstanding enormous efforts by some of America’s most respected contemporary academics, would-be reformers of the disclosure tort have not budged it since Prosser’s definition in the Restatement (Second). This …

Torts As (Only) Wrongs? An Empirical Perspective, Lawrence M. Solan, Joseph Sanders, Matthew Kugler, John M. Darley

Lawrence M. Solan

In this article, we report on several studies that explore peoples’ preferences for strict liability or negligence in assigning responsibility for accidents. Depending on the situation, a substantial percentage of individuals stand prepared to assign liability to actors who are not negligent. We relate these findings to current debate over whether the essence of tort law is compensation to victims for wrongs committed by defendants.

We begin with a brief discussion of the relative roles that strict liability and negligence play in the tort system, both historically and in current doctrine. In essence, both the scholarly literature and the law …

Unmasking A Pretext For Res Ipsa Loquitur: A Proposal To Let Employment Discrimination Speak For Itself, Bill Corbett

William R. Corbett

Unmasking a Pretext for Res Ipsa Loquitur: A Proposal to Let Employment Discrimination Speak for Itself

William R. Corbett*

Has too much tort law been incorporated into the case law under the federal employment discrimination statutes? The debate on this issue has been reinvigorated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Staub v. Proctor Hospital, 131 S. Ct. 1186 (2011). In Staub the Court referred to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, a federal employment discrimination statute, as a “federal tort.” The Court then adopted the tort doctrine of proximate cause as the standard for evaluating subordinate bias (or …

Statutes And Civil Liability In The Commonwealth And The United States: A Comparative Critique, Neil J. Foster

Neil J Foster

Both the major “common law” systems of private law allow breach of a criminal statute to inform or create civil liability. This paper discusses the differences and similarities between the Commonwealth jurisdictions and the United States of America in this somewhat under-theorised area. The aim is not to resolve all the problems presented by the jurisprudence and commentary on these various forms of action, but to provide a starting point for comparison between the approaches that the two systems have adopted on this issue of implied statutory civil liability. It is hoped that a proper understanding of the development of …

The Constitutional Bounding Of Adjudication: A Fuller(Ian) Explanation For The Supreme Court's Mass Tort Jurisprudence, Donald G. Gifford

Donald G Gifford

In this Article, I argue that the Supreme Court is implicitly piecing together a constitutionally mandated model of bounded adjudication governing mass torts, using decisions that facially rest on disparate constitutional provisions. This model constitutionally restricts common law courts from adjudicating the rights, liabilities, and interests of persons who are neither present before the court nor capable of being defined with a reasonable degree of specificity. I find evidence for this model in the Court’s separate decisions rejecting tort-based climate change claims, global settlements of massive asbestos litigation, and punitive damages awards justified as extra-compensatory damages. These new forms of …

A New Look At Duty In Tort Law: Rehabilitating Foreseeability, And Related Themes, Alani Golanski

Alani Golanski

Autonomous Weapon Systems: A Coming Legal Singularity?, Benjamin N. Kastan

Benjamin N Kastan

Military robotics has long captured the popular imagination in movies, books and magazines. In recent years, this technology has moved from the realm of science fiction to reality. The precursors to truly autonomous weapons, the so-called “drones”, have generated a great deal of discussion. Few authors, however, have applied current law to the developing technology of autonomous military robots, or “autonomous weapon systems”. The treatment of such subjects in the ethics, robotics, and popular literature has generally assumed that autonomous systems either fit perfectly into existing legal regimes or threaten long-standing paradigms. This article demonstrates that neither assumption is correct. …

Patient Protection And Decision Aid Quality: Regulatory And Tort Law Approaches, Nadia N. Sawicki

Nadia N. Sawicki

One of the most enduring debates at the intersection of administrative and tort law focuses on the challenge of identifying the most effective means of ensuring consumer safety. In some circumstances, standard-setting administrative regulations may be sufficient to protect consumers from harm while at the same supporting the growth of valuable industries. In other circumstances, regulation may need to be supplemented by a complementary tort regime that fills the compensation gap when consumers suffer injury. The discussion among policymakers and legal scholars about which system to favor is continually playing out in a variety of arenas, most notably in the …

Where’S The Outrage? “Outrageous” Conduct In Analyzing The Tort Of Intentional Infliction Of Emotional Distress In The Wake Of Snyder V. Phelps, Constance A. Anastopoulo, Daniel J. Crooks Iii

Constance A. Anastopoulo

This Article presents the historical evolution of the tort of Outrage focusing on a discussion of recovery for mental distress prior to the tort’s status as an independent cause of action including the culmination of the tort as announced in the Restatement (Second) Section 46. After presenting this evolution, this Article argues that the key inquiry of the tort of Outrage has been the nature of the defendant’s conduct rather than the severity of the plaintiff’s alleged injury, but now state courts have begun to redefine and reform the tort away from this central element. This Article concludes with the …

A Financial Economic Theory Of Punitive Damages, Robert J. Rhee

Robert Rhee

This Article provides a financial economic theory of punitive damages. The core problem, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, is not the systemic amount of punitive damages in the tort system; rather, it is the risk of outlier outcomes. Low frequency, high severity awards are unpredictable, cause financial distress, and beget social cost. By focusing only on offsetting escaped liability, the standard law and economics theory fails to account for the core problem of variance. This Article provides a risk arbitrage analysis of the relationship between variance, litigation valuation, and optimal deterrence. Starting with settlement …

A Tale Of Two Ironies: In Defense Of Tort, David Partlett, William Gill

William Gill

Contract Breaches And The Criminal/Civil Divide: An Inter-Common Law Analysis, Monu S. Bedi

Monu S Bedi

New York's Law Of Tax Malpractice Damages: Balanced Or Biased?, Jacob L. Todres

Jacob L. Todres

In this article Professor Todres focuses on two common elements of damages often incurred by plaintiffs who are the victims of negligently rendered incorrect tax advice—additional, avoidable taxes, and interest on underpaid taxes. Both of these types of damages appear not to be recoverable under current New York law that traces its roots to Alpert v. Shea Gould Climenko and Casey, 160 A.D.2d 67, 559 N.Y.S.2d 312 (1st Dept. 1990).

As to the non-recovery of additional taxes that could have been avoided with correct advice, Professor Todres argues that current New York law is incorrect. It is based upon Alpert, …

The Hedonic Impact Of Stand-Alone Emotional Harms: An Analysis Of Survey Data, David E. Depianto

David E. DePianto

This paper employs survey data on subjective well-being and a battery of self-assessed health measures to estimate the hedonic impact of emotional health, as decoupled from its physical counterpart. The disaggregation of global health into physical and emotional components is done with a parochial eye toward tort law, which has historically drawn a distinction between physical and emotional harms, limiting recovery on the latter — particularly “stand-alone” emotional harms —through various common law doctrines. The results of three sets of regression analyses suggest that a range of potentially inactionable emotional conditions, including emotional conditions with no concomitant physical manifestations, exert …

Workplace Health And Safety Law In Australia Update No 1, Neil J. Foster

Neil J Foster

This is one of a series of updates I will be issuing to provide notes of recent developments in Workplace Health and Safety Law which either have occurred after the book was published, or which I hadn't noticed previously. Update No 1 deals with changes to the common law in relation to actions for nervous shock by relatives of workers who are killed or injured by their employer's negligence.

Review Of "Liability For Wrongful Interferences With Chattels" By Simon Douglas (2011), Neil J. Foster

Neil J Foster

A review of a recent monograph dealing with the way the common law protects property rights in personal property.

Toward A Theory Of Medical Malpractice, Alex Stein

Alex Stein

This Article introduces a novel methodology for understanding medical malpractice law and guiding its reform. I divide the legal rules that apply in medical malpractice cases into four basic categories: “entry rules,” “exit rules,” “treatment rules,” and “setup rules.” The first two of these categories of rules intersect with the other two categories. Our medical malpractice system thus consists of treatment-related and setup-related entry and exit rules.

Based on this taxonomy, I demonstrate how our medical malpractice system responds to two major concerns about legal rules: form and institutional competence. As far as form is concerned, our system systematically prefers …

The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French

Christopher C. French

As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …

The “Non-Cumulation Clause”: An “Other Insurance” Clause By Another Name, Chris French

Christopher C. French

How long-tail liability claims such as asbestos bodily injury claims and environmental property damage claims are allocated among multiple triggered policy years can result in the shifting of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from one party to another. In recent years, insurers have argued that clauses commonly titled, “Prior Insurance and Non-Cumulation of Liability” (referred to herein as “Non-Cumulation Clauses”), which are found in commercial liability policies, should be applied to reduce or eliminate their coverage responsibilities for long-tail liability claims by shifting their coverage responsibilities to insurers that issued policies in earlier policy years. The insurers’ argument …

Debunking The Myth That Insurance Coverage Is Not Available Or Allowed For Intentional Torts Or Damages, Christopher French

Christopher C. French