Law Commons^™

The Illusion Of Efficiency In Workers' Compensation "Reform", Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

From the late 1980s to 1990s, most states enacted major revisions to their workers' compensation systems. These law changes aim to restrict benefits for injured workers in response to perceptions that rising workers' compensation insurance costs had reached crisis levels by the late 1980s. This article analyzes the main features of these benefit reforms, and shows how these reforms reveal the problems of the predominant economic efficiency rationales underlying recent retrenchment of social welfare programs in general.

Using workers' compensation as an example, I argue that a premise central to much of contemporary law and policy - the distinction between …